Is there a way to change the status of a number of entries at one time?
I know you can select a number of checkboxes and then edit all, but thats still time consuming if you have pages of entries. (In my case, many thousands)
This query should work:
UPDATE exp_channel_titles t
SET t.status = 'pending'
WHERE t.status = 'open'
AND t.channel_id = 'x'
Change 'x' to your channel id.
If you have a specific list of entry_ids you want to change, you can run a query like this with your entry_ids separated by commas:
UPDATE exp_channel_titles t
SET t.status = 'pending'
WHERE t.status = 'open'
AND t.entry_id in (1,2,3,4)