Content Approval: How to Approve All List Items in Bulk using PowerShell?

When content approval is turned-ON, approving items one by one could be hectic. To bulk approve items, We can utilize PowerShell, and here is my PowerShell script to bulk approve items pending content approval.

This was a huge time saver for me during a migration project.

PowerShell script to approve List items in Bulk:

This blog post will show you how to use PowerShell to approve all list items in bulk. This can be a useful tool if you need to quickly approve a large number of items without having to click the approve button for each item manually.

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

#Site URL and List Name variables
$WebURL="https://portal.crescent.com/sites/ops/"
$ListName="Tasks"

#Get all List Items
$ListItems= (Get-SPWeb $WebURL).Lists[$ListName].Items

#Iterate through each item
foreach($Item in $ListItems)
{
    #Approve Item
    $item["_ModerationStatus"] = "0" #1 to reject
  
    #Update the item
    $item.Update()
}
write-host "Total Items Approved:"$ListItems.Count

This PowerShell script simply loops through all items in the given list and approves them by setting the Approval Status field (Internal name is “_ModerationStatus”).