Find & Replace
Content ManagementBulk content management made easy.
Save Precious Time
The powerful solution for making bulk text changes across your entire website with confidence. Search and replace text in blocks, stacks, and page attributes while built-in safeguards and version control protect you from mistakes. With intelligent filtering options and multilingual support, you can update thousands of pages in seconds instead of hours or days.
Live Demo
Since this is a tool that exclusively works in the Dashboard, there is no front-end demo. Please view the Overview Video below to see how it works.
Features
- Site-Wide Search Power: Find and replace text across your entire website - including all blocks, stacks, page attributes, and global areas in one go.
- Foolproof Rollback: Built-in safety net lets you undo bulk changes instantly, with intelligent checks to prevent overwriting newer content.
- Precision Control: Four matching options (inside, exact, starts/ends with) plus case sensitivity controls ensure you find and replace exactly what you intend.
- Smart Filtering: Narrow your search by page name, URL, type, or date modified to target specific sections of your site with surgical precision.
- Deep Content Access: Instantly identify which blocks and fields contain matching text, with inline popups for quick SEO and attribute inspection.
- Version Control Integration: Every change utilizes Concrete CMS's native versioning system, maintaining a clear audit trail of modifications.
- User Accountability: Track content ownership with clear indication of page creators and approvers for every matched item, and an automatic record of each replacement/rollback in the Concrete CMS log.
- Multilingual Support: Safely update content within different language trees without cross-contamination between translations.
- Stack Integration: Seamlessly handle global content areas and stacks with distinctive visual indicators for easy identification.
- Guided Experience: Comprehensive inline help ensures confident usage regardless of technical expertise.
Overview Video
Beginner Tips
- This tool is ideal for blogs, online magazines, news sites, product catalogues, knowledge bases, technical documentation, education portals, government websites, product reviews, job listings, recipe sites, marketplaces, event lists - you name it. The more pages on your Concrete website, the more time you will save with this tool.
- To get more accurate search results, "ignore case" when searching, and optionally "match case" when replacing (or use "exact case"). For example, if you search for the word "hamster" (lowercase), but have "ignore case" turned on, then "Hamster" (with a capital H) will also be found.
- To target specific areas of your website, filter by: page name (eg. "widget"), page slug (eg. "/blog"), page type handle (eg. "blog_post"), or modified before/after date.
- If your site is configured for multiple languages, you can only search and replace content in one locale/language at a time. Set the Limit By Locale Site Tree in Dashboard > Find & Replace > Settings /dashboard/bulkfindreplace/settings.
- Important note: Find & Replace's rollback tool is not an alternative to a proper site backup system. It's best practice to make regular backups of your website database.
Advanced Tips
- View SEO properties, attributes, and versions within inline pop-ups to get deeper insight or make manual changes to individual pages from the search results.
- The search process is quite intensive, as it checks the value of every page, block and field for matching data. As such, this can take a while depending on the number of pages on your website. On a reasonably powerful server, you could expect to search through 10 pages per second, but mileage may vary. Using the page filter options will reduce the number of pages processed and speed things up.
- In Dashboard > Find & Replace > Settings /dashboard/bulkfindreplace/settings, check the Hide max field length limits to speed up the search by 25%. This is ideal for small text changes. Just be extra careful to avoid replacing content beyond the allowed database limit.
- It pays to be familiar with your blocks. You will reduce the risk of running into fringe cases that could cause some data loss.
- One situation would be replacing a value within a block that is set by a 'select' field (rather than text or WYSIWYG editor). The developer of that block may expect only specific values and you could override that with unexpected consequences.
- Another situation would be setting the replacement text to be longer than the database is designed to store for a specific field. For example, a particular block may allow strings up to 10 characters and you try setting the replacement to 12 characters. To help avoid this, each field displays a 'max length' for characters (longer numbers are abbreviated: k - thousand, m - million, b - billion, t - trillion).
- These 2 scenarios are not expected to be common when this powerful add-on is used in a typical way. But this heads up will help you to use it safer.
Installation
The Find & Replace package installation process also creates the following:
- Dashboard pages: Find & Replace > Find, Rollback, Settings /dashboard/bulkfindreplace
FAQs
Yes, the built-in rollback tool offers granular control to reverse changes. Built-in protection ensures only relevant page versions can be rolled back in case other users have modified the same page/s.
Yes, you sure can! The block type and field name will be displayed on the list of matches, so you know exactly what you're changing.
Yes, absolutely!
Yes, enter the desired "page slug" (such as "/blog"), and only pages containing that in the URL will be selected.
No, to protect your site from unintended matches, only 1 locale/tree can be modified at a time. This is by design. If you need to change a word/phrase across multiple languages, then you will need to repeat the process for each language.
To protect your website from unintentional changes, you won't be able to rollback a page version when another newer version exists. If you really need to roll it back, then you should discuss the change with the other editor and manually delete their version.
This page will be highlighted on the Rollback tool, along with the other user's name. You should contact them immediately to discuss the next steps and avoid accidently overwriting their changes.
Yes, every replacement and rollback is recorded in the Dashboard log /dashboard/reports/logs, along with the username and user ID for a transparent audit trail.