Iām considering DatoCMS as it seems to have many very nice ways of doing things. But I canāt seem to figure out how to do mass edits or quick edits in the list of documents?
Hi @john-olav,
Welcome to the forum, and thanks for considering us!
Unfortunately, bulk editing is something we currently do not support in the CMS itself. There is an open feature request for this: Bulk search and edit feature
Right now, the only way to bulk edit many records at once is to use our Content Management API and make a sequence of calls:
- List records: https://www.datocms.com/docs/content-management-api/resources/item/instances
- And then update one record at a time: https://www.datocms.com/docs/content-management-api/resources/item/update
Sorry about that!
Ok, perhaps it will be added later then.
Making elements in the list editable is quite easy to do. Also having an dialog with some more options for marked rows than publish/unpublish/delete is a straightforward improvement so Iām a bit surprised itās missing.
But other than that I really like DatoCMS
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Itās something Iāve personally wanted to see for a while, too. Iām also surprised that there werenāt more customer requests for it! (Thatās how we typically choose which big features to implement next).
I hope to see it in the near future as well. Sorry about that!
If there is a specific use case youāre trying to address and this is a blocker, itās potentially something we can partially get around via the plugins SDK: Plugin SDK Introduction | Documentation ā DatoCMS
That will take some work, and wonāt be as smooth as a proper bulk update functionality built into the CMS itself, but it might be enough for some simpler use cases. Let me know if thatās the case for you and Iāll try to think through (and maybe code up) an example plugin, if that would help.
Otherwise, thanks for considering us and sorry that this isnāt available yet!
My use case would be working with products for an e-commerce site. It would have been very efficient to just select the columns you want to edit and then switch to āeditā mode to update info for each field in the list.
Clicking in and out of products to update information is tedious if itās more that 5 items
Thanks for the explanation. Yes, it currently is quite tedious to update more than a couple of items at a time from the UI 
If helpful, Iād like to try to make you an example plugin that might make this process a little easier.
Can I ask what kind of field(s) you need to be able to bulk update? Text, boolean, JSON, etc.? Would you typically be setting all the records to the same value (e.g., selecting 10 products and setting a field to on_sale: true or category: "toys"?) Or if itās easier, can you share your actual model & record with me (you can email support@datocms.com) so I can see exactly what needs to be bulk-updated?
I donāt have a lot to show. Iām just playing around to figure out if DatoCMS is for us.
I really like the data modelling and user interface. But itās also a bit expensive. So then it would have to also be efficient to work in.
Totally understand, and thank you for the feedback!
Iāll work on a bulk edit plugin as time permits and show you the results once itās ready. If you find a better-suited CMS before then, no worries at all, hopefully youāll reconsider us for other projects in the future 
Thank you again for the suggestion.