Editing many posts at once in WordPress

Need to edit many posts at once in WordPress? Is the standard limit of 15 posts on the Posts Edit screen just not enough for you? Well, there is a hack you might be interested in. This involves editing the core WP files, so is not recommended as a permanent solution or for production sites… it works for me, but it might kill your cat and devastate the area around your home. You have been warned.

Check our wp-admin/includes/post.php, and find this line (it’s around line 805 in WP 2.7.1):

wp("post_type=post&what_to_show=posts$post_status_q&posts_per_page=15&order=$order&orderby=$orderby");

Change the “posts_per_page” value to whatever you see fit.

This came in handy for me on a site where I’d accumulated several thousand posts due to a rogue script, and I wanted to delete them through the GUI to take advantage of some plugin hooks, rather than just scrubbing the database.