feature request: batch processes in collections

Hi Observable. The new private collection capabilities are terrific! Thank you.

Am I missing a notebook about collection operations? I haven’t really began playing around for fear of consequences. For example, if I unpublish a collection, would affect the public status each notebook (I assume it would not)? Or can I mix public and private notebooks within public and private collections? When I have more time, I’ll create some dummy notebooks and experiment.

It would be really cool as a next step to offer batch controls within a collection. Like selecting multiple notebooks to publish or unpublish simultaneously. Or batch assign notebooks to multiple other collections.

Just quick thoughts. Hope this makes sense.

Thanks again for all the hard work and rapid advancement of the Observable platform!

Yes — we need to write up an explanatory notebook about how collections work, post- the launch of private collections.

In short: You can mix and match public, private and shared notebooks within public and private collections. The status of the collection affects its visibility on Observable, but not the visibility of any of the notebooks inside of it — so you can put private draft notebooks in your public collections, with the intention to maybe publish them later on, without fear.

Likewise, you can make a public collections private without affecting the published status of any of the notebooks within it.

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Note that there’s currently a bug that makes your public collections private if you unpin them. (@jashkenas Had some mail trouble - did you guys receive my bug report?)

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Very sorry — but I didn’t see your bug report @mootari.

But I did see this comment, and that bug is now squashed.

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