Bulk actions

Editorial teams routinely need to change something across many posts at once — publish a batch of scheduled announcements, hide a set of outdated articles, prune obsolete drafts. The Posts module supports three bulk operations directly from the article grid, executed atomically with a confirmation prompt for destructive actions.

Last updated 2 August 2026postsbulkoperations

This article covers the three bulk operations, how to select the target set, what happens during and after the operation, and the practical limits.

The bulk-action bar

Every row in the article grid on /post has a checkbox on the left. Selecting one or more rows exposes a bulk-action bar above the table with three actions:

Publish — set visibility to public on every selected post.
Unpublish — set visibility to private on every selected post.
Delete — soft-delete every selected post.

The bar also shows how many posts are currently selected and a Clear selection link to deselect all.

Selecting posts

Selection strategies:

Individual — tick the checkbox on each row you want.
All-visible — the checkbox in the table header selects every row currently rendered on the page.
All-matching — after selecting all-visible, some grids offer an "also select the N other rows matching this filter" extension. Selecting all-matching is the way to operate on a filtered subset that spans more than one page.

Filtering before selecting is the most common pattern:

Filter to draft status, select all, click Delete to clean up abandoned drafts.
Filter to a specific tag (a campaign identifier), select all, click Publish to launch the campaign at once.
Filter to unlisted, select all, click Publish to promote a batch of pre-launched articles.

Bulk publish

Publishing in bulk sets each selected post's visibility to public. The publication date is not touched:

Posts that already had a publication date in the past → now live.
Posts that had a publication date in the future → still scheduled; they will auto-flip to published at their date.
Posts that had no publication date → the platform assigns the current moment as the publication date, and they go live immediately.

The action fires atomically per post — every post's visibility change is a discrete write; a failure on one post does not abort the whole batch. The result toast tells you how many succeeded and how many were already public (nothing changed).

Use for coordinated launches — a set of related articles that must all go live at once.

Bulk unpublish

The mirror of bulk publish. Sets each selected post's visibility to private. The publication date is preserved so the archive history of "when was this first live" stays honest (see Visibility and lifecycle for how the private status differs from draft).

Common uses:

A pricing change means every existing pricing article is now inaccurate; unpublish the whole set until each is updated.
A legal review is pending across a batch of articles; take them offline collectively until cleared.
A category is being retired; unpublish every article in it before deleting the category.

Bulk unpublish does NOT delete — it hides. The articles remain editable in the admin and can be republished individually or in another bulk operation later.

Bulk delete

Soft-deletes every selected post. A confirmation dialog appears first — bulk delete is the most destructive of the three actions and the confirmation is mandatory.

After confirmation:

Every selected post moves to archived status.
The grid re-renders without them (unless the "show archived" filter is active).
Their canonical URLs return "not found" for anonymous readers.
All version history, comments, gallery images, attachments, and translations are preserved.

Restoration is one-at-a-time. There is no bulk-restore action. If you accidentally bulk-delete a large batch, restoring each individually is the only path. Reason for the asymmetry: bulk deletion is common (spring cleaning) but bulk restoration is rare and lends itself to accidental "undo an intentional delete" mistakes.

Practical limits

Bulk operations are executed sequentially — each post is updated in turn. Practical implications:

Small batches (up to a few dozen) — near-instantaneous.
Larger batches (hundreds) — take a noticeable moment; the UI shows a progress indicator and blocks the grid until the operation completes.
Very large batches (thousands) — supported but slow. If you need to operate on every article in a large organisation, consider using the Git workflow instead: export, edit frontmatter across every file with a script, re-import. The Git flow is designed for at-scale batch changes.

There is no hard cap on the number of posts in a single bulk operation, but selecting a thousand posts at once and clicking delete is a slow way to accomplish what a script would do in seconds.

What is NOT a bulk operation

Several common operations are single-post only:

Bulk tag assignment — no bulk-tag action. To tag many articles with the same tag, either open each individually or use the Git workflow.
Bulk category reassignment — no bulk-category action. Same workarounds.
Bulk translation — this is the exception: there IS a bulk translation flow, but it lives on the Translations tab (and in the admin terminal) rather than on the article grid. See Translations.
Bulk restore — one at a time.
Bulk export — not per-selection; the Git export always exports every article in the organisation.

Audit trail

Every bulk operation writes an audit entry per post to the organisation's activity log, recording:

Which member performed the bulk action.
Which post was affected.
What the change was (published, unpublished, deleted).
The timestamp.

The log preserves who did what and when — useful for after-the-fact review if a bulk action turns out to have been wrong.

Tips

Filter first, select second. Selecting rows manually is fine for small changes; for anything larger, get to the filtered subset first and then use "select all matching".
Test on a small subset before going wide. If you are about to bulk-delete a hundred articles, do one first and confirm the outcome is what you expect.
Bulk delete is reversible one at a time, so a small mistake is recoverable. A hundred-post mistake, however, is a hundred right-clicks to fix.
Coordinate with translations. A bulk publish of ten articles that only exist in the primary locale will surface ten new missing translations on the Translations dashboard. Consider running an auto-translate pass after the bulk publish so the launch is fully multilingual.

Post management overview
Visibility and lifecycle
Translations — for bulk translate.
Git workflow — for larger-scale batch operations.