Feature of the week: Improved batch-edit site

In the recent Bibsonomy Release (Link) we included a new batch-edit user interface - a means to manipulate several of your publication posts at once. Next to a complete overhaul of the pages layout came the introduction of BibTeX-Key normalization for multiple posts. This blog post shall give you an overview of the new idea behind the page design and functionality and the benefits that come with it.

Access to batch-edit site via the gear menu on the upper right.

As usual you can navigate to the batch-edit site via the little gear on the top right of your post overview.  

Link to click to get to batch-edit site.

You will be presented with a context menu showing the access to the batch-edit site in the lower part of the menu. Click this link (edit own entries) to get to the batch-edit site.

Standard view of the batch-edit site.

You now get an overview of the posts that you were just looking at as you did before. But now you can see that we changed the way to select certain actions quite a bit. All possible actions - available for your post selections - are displayed in the upper selection box. Tag fields are only activated if the corresponding action (update tags) and post are marked (via the front checkbox). Tags can be added to all selected posts below if the update tag action is activated, so there is no real change to the old behaviour. Completely new is the normalization of BibTeX-keys for several posts as one of the supported actions. An activated "update tag" selection can be seen in the picture below.

Update Tag view of the batch-edit site.

As you can see the tag fields are now accessible because the proper selection was made.

To sum things up, the main parts of the new page design are:

• checkboxes on the left to control selection of posts
• selection box to choose an appropriate action (now with BibTeX normalization)
• tag fields on the right to enter new tags or delete old tags

The new site design will help us to add new features to the batch-edit site and keep everything usable because now we do not use checkboxes for every single available operation.

We hope you like the new interface. As usual if you have feedback, please submit it in the comment section below.

Happy mass tagging ;)

Philipp