there is a way you can partially automate mass editing of categories on a wordpress.com site, using the imacros extension for firefox. i’m not going to do an extensive walkthru, writeup, however, but just a few key points.
i don’t know why wordpress still doesn’t give its users the ability to mass edit posts. those who’ve done bulk import and exports of a wordpress.com site have quickly learned the manual labor involved. let’s say you have 600 posts, 300 of which you need to move to another category once you’ve imported, and you go thru the wordpress menu bars only to find out, contrary to all expected logic, there is no ability to mass edit posts. what wordpress.com is telling you is that you need to manually edit each post. one by one. doesn’t really make much sense.
i ran into this today, with another wordpress.com hosted site i have i’m reorganizing. all my posts were in one category, and i needed them spread apart into 3 different categories. trying to figure if there were some external trick i could use to automate this, i discovered the imacros plugin for firefox.
here’s the part where i’m not gonna do a walkthru, and instead will just gloss over a basic summary. install the extension. firefox restarts. you get a little gear/folder icon that’s now to the right of your address bar. (there are intermediate steps, i’m just listing the major ones.) open up a sample post on your site that you need to move to another category. set imacro so it’s recording. change the category as you normally would, which, given the bad wordpress redesign that moved important functions below the screen fold, this simple function now takes a scroll, a click, another click, another click, then scroll back up, and another click to save. now click “stop” on imacros.
there you go. now, there might be cleaner ways to do this, but what i did was for all of the posts i wanted to move from “uncategorized” over to “random”, i, given i’m on a macbook, option-clicked to open each post i wanted to change in a new tab. so then i had 25 tabs of posts that all need to be individually changed.
there is something you’ve gotta do to edit the actual macro script you’re about to run, and your final script will look something like this:
VERSION BUILD=6070911 RECORDER=FX
TAB T=1
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:CHECKBOX FORM=NAME:post ATTR=ID:in-category-755 CONTENT=YES
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:CHECKBOX FORM=NAME:post ATTR=ID:in-category-30 CONTENT=NO
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:SUBMIT FORM=ID:post ATTR=ID:save-post
TAB T=2
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:CHECKBOX FORM=NAME:post ATTR=ID:in-category-755 CONTENT=YES
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:CHECKBOX FORM=NAME:post ATTR=ID:in-category-30 CONTENT=NO
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:SUBMIT FORM=ID:post ATTR=ID:save-post
TAB T=3
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:CHECKBOX FORM=NAME:post ATTR=ID:in-category-755 CONTENT=YES
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:CHECKBOX FORM=NAME:post ATTR=ID:in-category-30 CONTENT=NO
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:SUBMIT FORM=ID:post ATTR=ID:save-post
TAB T=4
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:CHECKBOX FORM=NAME:post ATTR=ID:in-category-755 CONTENT=YES
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:CHECKBOX FORM=NAME:post ATTR=ID:in-category-30 CONTENT=NO
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:SUBMIT FORM=ID:post ATTR=ID:save-post
TAB T=5
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:CHECKBOX FORM=NAME:post ATTR=ID:in-category-755 CONTENT=YES
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:CHECKBOX FORM=NAME:post ATTR=ID:in-category-30 CONTENT=NO
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:SUBMIT FORM=ID:post ATTR=ID:save-post
TAB T=6
and so on. also, i’ve found that imacro generally puts one of the first steps something that means “go to this specific post”. you need to take that line out. or else you’ll find that when you run your macro on a post, it’ll go back and reopen the original post you created the macro with.
now click to run the macro, and watch as all your posts are now automatically modified and saved for you, as imacro runs thru each tab and does all the work for you.
again, there may be cleaner ways to use imacro to do this, and this isn’t the only way you can mass edit posts (there is a may you can do so via phpmyadmin, but i try not to go into phpmyadmin unless i have to), but the imacros extension is the quickest workaround for mass editing of posts for a wordpress.com site i’ve been able to find.
one minor glitch: again, what with the craptastistic wordpress redesign recently, you know how we used to have a nice listing of all the categories in the sidebar of a post? and now it’s crammed not only into a tiny, tiny horizontal box where you can only see 5 categories at a time, below the screen fold…. they now have forced that there’s a “most used” categories selection that pops open first, and now you have to manually click “all” to actually see all your categories…. gods, i still have so many issues with the wordpress redesign. anyhow, if the category you’re moving a post to isn’t in the “most used” list, for some reason, at the time i’m writing this entry, imacros won’t recognize clicking to open the all categories list, it might be an ajax-related issue, not sure, and so you have to intercede with each tab to click open all categories for the macro.
