Plugin Author
anmari
(@anmari)
Hi Michael,
The challenge with offering something like that is the validation of the fields. Unless the same plugin has created the fields (so it knows the validation that should be applied to any changes) OR the fields available to be edited are limited to known wp fields with same validation as in wp, it would be extremely dangerous to allow free editing. One could mess up the data completely breaking functionality.
Could you describe the user case a bit more? what sort of data are they envisaging that they want to bulk edit? and how often?
eG: is it like:
change all instances of “golden” in member type to “Golden” for a selected set of uusers.
or is it say entering unique content in a field for each user, spreadsheet style?
There is this:
http://vip.wordpress.com/2012/07/12/bulk-user-management/
which appears to be more multisite role based. I have not used it myself.
Thanks for the prompt and, as ever, helpful reply. I understand your point – I hadn’t thought of that. In our user’s case, it would be a combination of the two approaches you have outlined. That is, there would be occasions when a bulk update of a particular field was required – as in your ‘golden’ example – but there would also be occasions when a number of different records need individual fields editing (i.e. the ‘spreadsheet’ mode). The vast number of our usermeta fields are just plain text and have been created with the WP Users plug-in. So, in our particular case, validation mightn’t be such a problem. However, I can see that from the general point of view it would be unwise to bank on that. We had considered using something like PhpGrid (http://www.phpgrid.net/) to achieve this, but the SQL statements needed to turn WordPress’s raw data into something user friendly on the page would need writing from scratch, so we’ve shied away from this. There is (or was) a WP plug-in to amalgamate phpgrid with WP, but it seems to be withering on the vine in development terms. It does occur to me, though, that you must have already done all this work somewhere within Amr Users.
I had a look at the plug-in you mentioned, but it is only for multi-site – in fact, will not install on single-site instances – so, apart from any other limitations, it is not for us.
Brief update: Anyone looking for something that might help with the problem described above could take a look at this: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-db-table-editor/ Not very ‘user-friendly’ but it does work ,on single tables, at least. Doesn’t seem to like carrying out JOIN requests from an SQL query, which might be a problem.
