Group Edit - traumatic but overall successful experience

This has turned from a Question to a Discussion, but it's more like a blog entry. I'm just documenting the experience and hoping for someone to fill in the gaps for others who follow.

I've been looking for a way to mass-edit resources to change their template. I tried using Janitor but it doesn't seem to have this capability. Old forum posts mention DocManager but that seems long gone. So I found Group Edit which has recent updates.

The Readme is in Russian, and machine-translated to English. The doc is pretty bad, doesn't explain what's happening.

Initial pain
I installed the Group Edit package, refreshed the browser, then selected a resource Category, and went to menu>Components>Group Editing Resources. At the top it displays Новости ('News' in English) and a List tab. I don't see a way to add existing resources to the list for editing. Click New Resource (which doesn't makes sense in this context), and it gets hung trying to load something. Click Find and it doesn't find anything - I don't know where it's looking. The documentation (provided below) talks about Parents but there is no clue what that means in this context.

Some success
I opened System settings and modified the group_edit values. I changed 'Fields and ID TV for grid':
from: pagetitle,alias,publishedon||pagetitle,alias,1,2
to: template,pagetitle,alias,publishedon||template,pagetitle,alias,publishedon
(just the same thing in both places because I don't know what this means)
It seems the parent for changes is coded to a resource category ID. As I said above, I thought we would select a group, then edit. This is for editing pre-defined groups, which to me doesn't make a lot of sense yet. I have a document/container called Articles, ID=44, so I set these as the values for 'Parent name' and 'Parent ID' respectively. From the defaults it's apparent that multiple parents can be specified here, delimited by commas. I don't understand how that works yet. I also set group_edit.hide_children_in_tree to No, thinking this would enable the display of all resources under a container.

Going back to menu>Components>Group Editing Resources, the List now shows all resources under that single parent/container, not the container itself. The fields above are displayed and editable. But the Batch Action dropdown/button says "remove selected" and I was terrified to do anything.

I wanted to change the template, and on clicking the template ID fields they become editable (like in system settings. So I changed all templates from the current 7 to 14. On each update a query was processed in the background to update the resource. (I was in a panic, but kept going.) There is a Save button on this page but it's always disabled - no chance to save the batch or to go back in case all the resources are trashed. I didn't attempt to save or click anything else, I went the resource tree and pull up an item - the template was changed. I pulled up other random resources and they're changed too. Nothing looks trashed. It did what I want.

OK, I went from panic to fairly comfortable. Unless someone has some decent docs for this, I'd like to clean up this explanation, add some more detail, and add it to the wiki. Can anyone offer some info to fill in the above?

Thanks!

I'm not familiar with Group Edit, but have succesfully used Batcher in the past for similar tasks.

Captain Starbuck,

Thank you very much for sharing your experiences with group_edit. Cutting through the language barrier and terseness of the readme.txt is proving a challenge for me. With your help I've gotten through to a working group edit of product resources, but what bugs me is the big fat "null" text above the grid, and I can't figure out where it's coming from. Have you seen that as well? I'm on MODX 2.2.6-pl with the latest group_edit.

I hope to have enough time down the line to help out our Russian developer friend with some more verbose English help information, either in the package or at least here on the forum.

Again, thanks!

I've also used Batcher, and it works fine.

Thanks, I've looked at Batcher but it seems to have a different feature set from group_edit and might be too flexible for my site owner to wield safely . Can Batcher show image TVs in a column like group_edit and be limited so the site owner doesn't accidentally "batch destroy" her product catalog?