Views Bulk Operations is a really useful module when setting up customized administration pages – allowing site editors to quickly overview and manipulate nodes, users and other entities on the site. You have probably used the module before. However, you might not have noticed the pretty significant changes VBO has had for its Drupal 7 version.
The most important (and visible) change for D7 is that VBO no longer is implemented as a Views style ("VBO table")– but as a field ("bulk operation fields"). When seeing this at first it seems pretty weird, but after using it a few times it seems so natural that you're surprised it wasn't implemented this way to start with.
A pretty big advantage of this approach is that you can now use any type of Views style as a VBO – feel free to add bulk operation fields to HTML lists, tables or even slideshows. An advantage not as obvious is that you can, in the VBO field, specify which Views object it should work with. In Drupal 6, VBO could only work with the base object of the view – now you can work with any entity joined by relationships. Sweet!
Some other cool updates to VBO are:
- You can now override the text displayed for each action. Yes!
- You can select if actions should be managed in batches, for each action separately.
- You can skip confirmation step for each action separately, too.
A third cool update is drastically improved integration with Rules – in fact, you are encouraged to use Rules components when providing new actions to VBO. (Luckily, this is done quite easily.) Two further really sweet integrations are:
- The possibility to add configuration pages to your VBO actions, just by adding additional parameters to your Rules component. (Sounds weird at first, but is quite straight forward.)
- The possibility to use bulk operations views to load lists of entities into Rules. Since Rules can loop through lists and perform actions, this means that you can now use Views to select nodes, users or other entities that should be processed with Rules. Very powerful indeed.
Interested? Here are five screencasts that summarizes VBO:
- Introducing Views Bulk Operations
- More details about VBO settings
- Using Rules components with VBO
- Using Rules componens with more than one parameter
- Using VBO to load list of objects into Rules
Have fun!