Add ability to include a Default Value to fields in the content builder

[Phil (Phil Snow)]

Hi Emerson,

Sorry about the delay in the reply. I moved your comment here as it's more relevant to this open feature request and also maybe this other bulk actions request:

Bulk delete articles / documents

Is there a way to bulk delete articles? Once you have multiple languages, deleting content can get really time consuming. Say we have 10 languages, and 10 articles we want to delete. This would require hundreds of clicks, as each article in each language would need to be opened, archived, then opened again, then deleted! This also applies to tags, as trying to find out where a tag is being used in a multi locale environment can be extraordinarily difficult. I think having the ability to delet…

The behaviour you're experiencing here is the expected behaviour, as adding a new default populated field and republishing already existing documents could cause breaking changes to user's applications. I'm not sure it's so dangerous with a boolean, but the problem might be how republishing affects other fields in the documents. I'm reaching out to the team to get more information about this.

The workaround for the moment in your case to trigger a default boolean value for hundreds of pre-existing documents would be to use the import/export feature (beginning on the medium plan). You would export all the documents, run a script to update all the boolean fields and re-import them, this would trigger the publish again on all these documents and the content would stay the same except for the boolean field.

I realise this is less than ideal and I think this is why something like this is a good candidate for bulk actions. I'm also going to reach out to the UX research team about this to get their input.

If/when anything changes for this we'll update you here.

Thanks.