Bulk update of Drupal 7 taxonomy terms

2
votes

My Drupal 7 site has a bit redundant taxonomy structure with taxonomy terms "Article" and "Document" being used synonymously. Hence a large number (several hundreds) of nodes has both "Article" and "Document" terms applied to them. What I want to do is to "separate" these terms shuffling nodes randomly between them so about half of the nodes currently marked "Article" and "Document" will only have "Article" term and the other half will only be marked "Document".

What's the best way to go about this? Is there a module for bulk updating nodes adding/removing taxonomy terms? Am I better off with updating the database directly?

Thank you.

3
drupaldrupal-7drupal-taxonomy
If you're assigning terms randomly, it's not really a taxonomy. – Forest

3 Answers

2
votes

I found a solution for this:

I have "Administrative Views" module installed (Requires: Views, Chaos tools, Views Bulk Operations, Entity API - links are on the module page under dependencies).

From there you select the nodes you want to change and select "change value" in the "operations" dropdown and hit execute. Under "Fields for type {your nodetype}" you can click "tags" for example and enter the new value to overwrite all - or you click "Add new value(s) to Tags, instead of overwriting the existing values." and the value will be added.

It turns out adding a tag this way, there are new tags added for every updated node - so if you edit 20 nodes and add the tag "stackoverflow" there will be 20 tags called "stackoverflow" in the terms list. You may then merge the duplicates with "Term Merge" into one final term.

0
votes

Since you need to update the taxonomy structure in bulk you can use - Taxonomy Manager http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_manager/ Which apart from other features has -

  • dynamic treeview
  • mass deleting
  • mass adding of new terms
  • moving of terms in hierarchies

You can also take a look at a similar question - https://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/11494/adding-taxonomy-terms-to-multiple-nodes-at-once

If nothing helps updating the database sure seems a simpler option, but use it only if you are very sure of your query, and don't forget to take a backup before.. :)

0
votes

Taxonomy Manager is the a very good module for these purposes I used it myself to tag and add vocabularies to my website that has more than 100 posts. Its interface is also very intuitive and user-friendly.