Create your own bulk actions – WP Engineer

Including version 4.6 it was quite difficult to add custom bulk actions to the WordPress admin pages. In version 4.7 a hook is added that simplifies the task a lot:

add_action('bulk_actions-{screen_id}', 'my_bulk_action');

Defining the hook

As an example we’ll use the post page, the variables are named accordingly.

add_filter( 'bulk_actions-edit-post', 'register_my_bulk_actions' );

Definig the hook

function register_my_bulk_actions($bulk_actions) {
  $bulk_actions['my_bulk_action'] = __( 'My Bulk Action', 'domain');
  $bulk_actions['my_other_bulk_action'] = __( 'My Other Bulk Action', 'domain');
  return $bulk_actions;
}

You can define more than one bulk action in this function because it merely adds an additional element to the array $bulk_actions. You simply have to take care that you use different names for the element keys and, logically, for the display texts.

The screen ids

The screen id of an admin page can be displayed this code snippet:

$screen = get_current_screen();
var_dump($screen);

This table shows the ids for some admin pages:

Page
$screen_id
File

Media Library
upload
upload.php

Comments
edit-comments
edit-comments.php

Tags
edit-post_tag
edit-tags.php

Plugins
plugins
plugins.php

Links
link-manager
link-manager.php

Users
users
users.php

Posts
edit-post
edit.php

Pages
edit-page
edit.php

Edit Site: Themes
site-themes-network
network/site-themes.php

Themes
themes-network
network/themes

Users
users-network
network/users

Edit Site: Users
site-users-network
network/site-users

Sites
sites-network
network/sites

Defining the callback function

Here’s an overview of the whole function:

add_filter( 'handle_bulk_actions-edit-post', 'my_bulk_action_handler', 10, 3 );

function my_bulk_action_handler( $redirect_to, $action_name, $post_ids ) { 
  if ( 'my_bulk_action' === $action_name ) { 
    foreach ( $post_ids as $post_id ) { 
      $post = get_post($post_id); 
      // process $post wp_update_post($post); 
    } 
    $redirect_to = add_query_arg( 'bulk_posts_processed', count( $post_ids ), $redirect_to ); 
    return $redirect_to; 
  } 

  elseif ( 'my_other_bulk_action' === $action_name ) { 
    foreach ( $post_ids as $post_id ) { 
      $post_meta = get_post_meta( $post_id ); 
      // process $post_meta update_post_meta( $post_meta ); 
    } 
    $redirect_to = add_query_arg( 'other_bulk_posts_precessed', count( $post_ids ), $redirect_to );
    return $redirect_to; 
  } 
  
  else 
    return $redirect_to;

[…]

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This article was written by Latz and originally published on WP Engineer.