Category bulkedit module released

The categoryi package has a new addition: the category_bulkedit module. This module has been under development in the HEAD branch for the past week or so, and is now stable and relatively bug-free, and is available in the 4.7 branch. Category_bulkedit allows you to edit multiple categories or containeris at once: you first select the nodes that you wish to edit; then you select the fields to edit; then you enter your new values; and then the values get saved in bulk, for potentially hundreds of nodes! The development of this module was jointly sponsored by drupal.org users Kiteatlas and Ramdak.

Category_bulkedit is very useful for things such as moving large quantities of categories to a different container, giving a lighter or heavier weighti to a whole lot of categories, or re-configuring menu or display settings for many containers. The bulk edit process can be performed for containers or for categories (but not for both at once), and it can be accessed through the new 'bulk edit' tab, which appears in the category administration pages of a site when the module is enabled.

On the technical side, category_bulkedit is possibly the first real-life module that uses the Drupal 4.7 multipage forms template. Getting the template to work for the purposes of this module was a tremendous effort, because the template currently does not provide adequate support for the multi-select and multi-checkbox form elements. However, all of the many technical hurdles of getting a multipage form to work have been overcome, and the wizard-like form works amazingly well. I intend to clean up the improvements that have been made to the template, and to commit them to the main template file in the Drupal CVS repository, so that other module developers can also benefit from using any and all form elements within a multipage form.