Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.This might already be a dupe, but I didn't find anything...
People go to, for example, admin/structure/types and change the default publishing options for Article, after they've already created a few articles. According to several support requests I've seen and classes I've taught, people generally seem to expect that these settings should then take effect automatically for all previous content, when in reality this only is a "from here onward" mechanism. Confusing.
Certain modules, such as Pathauto, have a custom workaround for this, where you can specify either to save, or to update all previous entries. Others, such as Ubercart, have feature requests for this pending: #298395: Let admin push class attribute/option changes out to existing nodes
It'd be nice if core offered such a generic mechanism that other modules such as these could hook into.
Comments
Comment #1
mlncn commentedSubscribing (and tagging as a possible tie-in to a possible SettingsAPI...)
Comment #2
klonos...coming from #1007636: Provide means to set defaults for new content types' settings + mass edit & overview of existing content type's settings which was marked as a duplicate of this issue.
Besides allowing people to apply changes to previously created content of a certain content type, there should be ways to push changes to other content types. A common use case of this is to allow site admins to set all content types to create revisions. The Content Type Overview project allows this sort of functionality by providing a settings matrix where similar settings can be viewed side-by-side for all content types and can be edited in one place.
Even if we implement a way to allow mass changing of settings for content types (and *optionally* push these changes to previously created content), there is still the issue where new content types created will still be created with defaults that are "hard-coded". That's why we should also have a way to allow defining defaults for newly created content types. For example if a site admin thinks it's good practice to always have revisions, they should be able to tell Drupal that they want this setting to be the on for every content type they might create in the future.
Related: #518434: "Create New Revision" the default drupal behavior for nodes
Let me know if you think these feature requests deserve their own issues.
Comment #15
catchThis is covered by https://www.drupal.org/project/field_defaults
If someone wanted to look at moving that into core, it should be a new ideas issue.
Comment #16
catch