Collections are extremely useful in a website for a number of reasons. They're great for displaying content dynamically, based on a search criteria that you set. With a simple trick you can use the results of a Collection to bulk edit your content items. Here's how:

1. Navigate to a Collection you'd like to use
2. Once there, add folder_contents to the end of the web address (i.e. http://www.mysite.org/upcoming-events/folder_contents)
3. You should now see a screen that looks something like this:

The same buttons that appear under the Contents tab are now available in the Collection results page. This means you can bulk delete, rename, copy, cut, or change state on this dynamically generated content without having to go to each folder where that content is contained.

Some common applications include situations where you want to:

- Delete all content from my site older than a certain date (i.e. content from before January 2009)

- Publish all content related to a particular keyword

- Delete news and events based on a relative date range (i.e. more than 6 months old)

- Many more!

Of course you would need to create the Collection capable of pulling the content items together that you wanted to edit.

To access the Advanced search feature in Plone you must append search_form to the end of your web address (i.e. http://www.mysite.org/search_form). You should then see a page titled Advanced Search with a variety of criteria fields available.

There are a number of ways to creatively filter search results with the criteria of the Advanced Search form. Some of the most useful ones are:

• Search Text searches the Title, Description, and Body of content items. Leave blank if you don't want to filter based on search terms.
• New Items Since filters results based on the creation date. This is very useful if you want to see what content has been recently created on your website.
• Item Type allows you to select the Content Types you wish to include in the search.
• Author filters results based on a particular user. You need to know the username of the person you wish to find results for.
  
• Review Status refers to the Publishing State of the content items. For example, you can restrict search results to include only Published or Private items.

You can apply several of these criteria to a single search. For example, if you wanted to find all published News Items on your site that contain the word "Climate" you would do the following:

1. Type "Climate" into the Search Text field
2. Select only News Item from the Item Type checkboxes
3. Select only Published from the Review Status checkboxes
4. Click Search at the bottom of the form
   

To get started you must go to the Plone Control Panel. Click the Site Setup link (usually found near the top of your site along with the other site action links) or add plone_control_panel to the end of your web address. You should now see a screen like this one:

Now click on the Search icon in this listing. You can now choose which content types you would like to include in search results, as well as toggle the LiveSearch feature on or off. The familiar content types that you are used to working with will be in this listing mixed in with some content types that may be unfamiliar to you. There are legacy types (such as the CMF content types) from earlier versions of Plone and some are there because of add-on products you have installed.

Be sure to click Save when you are finished.