How to search and replace for multiple webpages.

I made a forum post to help a fellow who was looking to do the following and thought it might help my readers looking to quickly make changes to existing webpages without having to do it manually…here’s the question.

Let’s say I want to add a new link to my menu on all my 10,000 pages of my site.

Anyone know of a software that automates this task? I did hear about one years ago… but forgot the name.

Karl…I use a simple program called search and replace, its freeware and you can find it at http://www.rjlsoftware.com/software/utility/search/

If your menu is confined to a snippet of code you can use the software to located that snippet and replace it with the new menu snippet.

As someone else mentioned, I’d find the snippet for the menu and then replace the snippet with a php include. This would bring the code in from an external file. This would also allow you to make changes to one file and have those changes show up on every page automatically.

Word of caution. Once you change something with this software there is NO UNDO! So copy a folder and practice before you actually use it.

Also, the way it works…is that you locate the folder that your webpages are in and tell it to look for “something” to replace with “something” If you use your local folder, make the changes you can upload and overwrite the existing files….so you won’t have to download all 10,000 pages.

I would just stress that you want to make sure you understand how it works before making changes on 10,000 pages….please experiment by creating a folder and adding/copying a few of the pages you want to change. Try the program to see if you can make it do what you want it to do before doing all 10,000 pages

Good luck

Scott

Tags: free software, adding webpage content, search and replace