Bulk Updating Page Titles

Permalink October 16, 2013 at 12:30 PM

I have a website I created for a client that has an online equipment inventory. Each page in the inventory has the same pattern for the page title, where the year of the equipment is the first 4 characters of the title.

Now they've decided that they no longer want the year in the title or the URL (so the handle/slug). They have close to 200 pages like this so they would appreciate any way of automating the update. I'm thinking we should be able to run a SQL query to update all the pages, but since I'm not really familiar with the concrete5 database structure I'm not positive what I should be updating. If at all possible, I would like to just change the approved version of the page. All of the pages live under the "Inventory" page and have a page type of "Equipment Details", which I discovered the ctID of this page type is 89.

Anyone have any ideas for the query I'd need to write to accomplish this? Or is there another way?

Thanks in advance!

Blake

leinteractive replied on Oct 16, 2013 at 12:56 pm Permalink Reply

While I don't have an answer to your question, you're going to run into a bigger problem if you change all of your URLs in that every hard coded link to those pages will result in 404 pages and every search engine that has indexed those pages will result in a 404 crawl error.

You'll need to find a way to take advantage of C5's "Save old Page Path" option when moving/renaming pages and URLs.

bbeng89 replied on Oct 16, 2013 at 12:59 pm Permalink Reply

Hm, I don't believe we have any hard-coded URLs but you make a good point about the search engines. I think the client's main concern is the page titles though, so if there was a way to just update those that would work too.

leinteractive replied on Oct 16, 2013 at 1:18 pm Permalink Best Answer Reply

For 200 pages, I would just use the built in Bulk SEO Editor in the Dashboard. You still have to change each page manually, but at least you don't have to go page to page to page in the sitemap.

It would probably take 20 minutes or so to edit the page titles...less time than it would to find a way to to it automatically.

bbeng89 replied on Oct 16, 2013 at 3:56 pm Permalink Reply

So this is what I ended up doing. However, using the bulk SEO updater it only updated the meta title, it didn't actually update the page title. So I ended up still having to go through every page in the sitemap and change it's title. So I got it done, it just wasn't very fun...

I would still like to know if there is a way to accomplish this though, in case this happens again one day but it's more pages than I can manually edit.