Posted 3 years ago #
07/21/08 17:58:02 changed by ryan ¶
status changed from new to closed.
resolution set to wontfix.
milestone deleted.
Thank you :-/
But thank YOU!
07/23/08 03:45:08 changed by DD32 ¶
Just a quick note: I've released a plugin which allows you to define the Revisions default setting from the admin, As well as on a per-post/page basis: http://dd32.id.au/wordpress-plugins/revision-control/
Seems like core developers are giving off more and more responsibility to plugin authors.
@fantasycrusader: So, your basic reason for wanting the post revisions turned off is "I don't want them" or "I'll not use them". Just because you don't want to use a tiny little bit more space (we're talking about TEXT here, it compresses very well, you know), you want to disable a potentially very handy cover-your-ass feature. This makes no sense to me.
I mean, what does turning revisions off actually do? Well, it makes it not save revisions, but there is no major UI impact whatsoever. Revisions won't appear in the revisions box. That's it. That's all that happens. It doesn't get any faster, there's no significant improvement anywhere from disabling it, it just takes potentially very handy functionality and castrates it, to no benefit whatsoever.
Furthermore, the post revisions feature is not targeted at the CMS crowd, it's targeted at the single blogger, the one who posts on his own and is trying to make good posts. Revising drafts several times is a commonplace activity, just because you knock off your posts in one take doesn't mean everybody works that way.
The majority of users don't mind the post revision feature. But for those power users who simply must have it, there's a simple disable code. Adding actual option checkboxes for something that most people do not care about doesn't make any sense from a UI standpoint.
Otto,
I agree - users that are concerned about space, ID's and database entries are the ones that are perfectly able to find the wp-config setting to disabled revisions. But what are your thoughts about the design of the feature in the current version? There seems to be some legitimate concern there.
As well as space, the other issue is the way post IDs very quickly become large. This is the case even if a plugin is used to delete all the revision and autosave posts from the database.
I've noticed that post IDs are effectively hidden in the admin screen from 2.5 onwards. However, they are still used by many people. Some people may use them in permalinks to give short URLs. Their URLs may now have jumped from example.com/1, example.com/2 to example.com/25 then example.com/112.
Some plugins also make use of IDs.
It also seems that autosaves result in an additional "post" in the table that isn't deleted even when editing is complete.
Really it might have been better if revisions and autosaves had been contained in a separate table so that they didn't interfere with the way posts are contained in the database.
@microkid: I think it has some minor issues, but they are minor and solvable. Disabling it still makes no sense.
@jrawle: Why does the post ID matter at all? It's just an identifier. It holds no meaning beyond that.
To give you an example, in my databases, I don't use an auto-increment identifier. I use a GUID for the main ID fields. This is an identifier that looks like this: ee1ceef0-598c-11dd-ae16-0800200c9a66. There's actually several advantages to using these sort of identifiers.
Identifiers are not meant to be exposed to the world. Sure, the post ID's are, unless you use pretty permalinks (like most people want to do anyway). But the identifier itself is meaning-free. It's just a number that does not change. The post ID will always remain the same in that database. A particular revision's ID will never change. For an ID, a random number would work just as well.
Posted 3 years ago #
I've created three plugins using the solutions by GamerZ and Untwisted Vortex:
Disable Revisions and Autosave plugins
You can easily deactivate Revisions, Autosave or both of them at the same time.
Thanks for the plugin. That method of disabling autosave is particularly welcome as it's better than setting the autosave interval to a large number!
Posted 3 years ago #
You're most welcome jrawle.
The code is not mine; I've got both Revisions and Autosave problems so I searched on the net for a work-around, I selected the code that was the best solution to my needs and injected it into a WP's plugin.
It's ok to me, as long as it works! ;)
Posted 3 years ago #
I don't mind the autosave feature concept, what i mind is when the autosave happens after a publish or save action and on the diff I get "These revisions are identical."
I don't mind the revisions save ... its a great feature while creating posts What I want it to do is delete them when the post is published.
Posted 3 years ago #
This feature annoys me to no end! Every time I update my sites, I end up with a draft and a published version of the same article, whether I want it or not. To make matters worse, if I choose an URL for my article, a draft is auto-saved, and then I publish it, the URL is changed, adding a -2 to it. Then, I have to go in and delete the draft, and edit the article that's published to give it the correct URL.
This should be something we can disable without adding yet another plugin---the very last thing any of my three WP blogs needs.
I was just at Google webmaster tools and my revisions are somehow getting spidered (and not found) soon there will be hundreds, then thousands? of 404 clutter entries in there and not sure what the google bot and page rank might see fit to do with all this slop.
Also I am suspicious that revisions and / or autosave horked my Twitter Updater - as soon as I updated to 2.6 my twitter updates started being duplicated As a solution I ended up disabling the Twitter updater plugin and using my Feedburner Feed / Twitterfeed instead
Posted 3 years ago #
I just have to put in my 5 cent, that i see absolutely no problem in including a opt-in option in the settings screen. If usability is the excuse not to do it, then create an advanced settings tab. It really can't be that difficult.
Granted, it's a good and almost harmless feature, but with slow and or large databases it makes searching and querying even slower. And that harms usability even more, because it hits my end-users and therefore my clients profits. For any "usability expert", it should be clear, that this should be an option in the settings tab. Lose a little admin usability to ensure a worst-case scenario of end-user usability. To me, it's logic.
Otherwise, i'm very happy with my WP sites.
Posted 3 years ago #
And, by the way, leaving the solution up to plugin developers is the lesser choice when facing this question (and most other, imho).
Seems like core developers are giving off more and more responsibility to plugin authors.
-- Alphawolf
That just clutters my settings screen even more. Good plugin, though.
I don't like post revisions because it ruins the plugin I made to display important data. I hope a fix is in order.
Posted 3 years ago #
@Otto42, I agree with fantasycrusader. I don't care about past posts. Referring your email-case, you don't read your month or year old mails, do you? Ofcourse not, they render meaningless over time. I understand when you are with multi users, though as solely blogger, revisions are of no use. I think, alike, revision control plugin should be in the core.
Thanks for the "define ('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 0);" tip, should be a setting in the admin panel, which also a notice the user of having revisions.
It's not saving DB space, it's just I don't like data I don't use.
Well, the first idea I don't like of WordPress. So good job developpers, please be aware a truly love WordPress <3. Just some control about the revisions will do.
Why post revisions can be problematic: I sometimes revise posts on our site (center a photo, correct a typo). Today, I added a graphic to a post. Upon saving it, the change was no longer there in the editing pane, and on viewing it, the post was not found. Obviously some glitch in the database occurred, so I went into MySQL Admin to fix the post. But there was revision after revision. It will take me a while to figure out what needs to be done in there. What a mess, just to accommodate a rarely used niche feature. It's a rare blog that has to be run like Wikipedia.
Adding complexity (while arguing for simplicity in not offering an option to disable it) that is not needed by almost all users is just asking for trouble. And the "space is cheap" argument sounds like an attempt to rationalize lazy programming -- and the WordPress programmers certainly are not guilty of that.
Posted 3 years ago #
i might have been a jerk but i certainly cant sleep well when i know my system is messed up but appears well. A simple button to clean up all revisions and explicitly tell wordpress that I am done with all current posts would make 2.6 a lot more usable to many loyal users. I guess it's not hard to create a new plugin for it, but nothing is better than an original wordpress button.
Posted 3 years ago #
Post revisions wreaks absolute HAVOC with anyone using the organize series plugin.
You end up with 60 or 70 revisions when writing a 5 part series which all show up in the series TOC. The posts re-number themselves as to the series part numbers randomly and have to be manually re-set.
I want something that allows me to delete revisions when I am certain I'm done with them. The SQL database is still a little scary to me. I don't need developers telling me that my concerns are of little consequence when they create extra work that I am reluctant to perform for obvious reasons.
How about a fix instead of a lecture?
Posted 3 years ago #
I feel like in the Revisions section, each link to view a past revision should also include a "Purge Past Revisions" link, so that revisions previous to that specific one can be totally removed.
I have a blog that uses images and is still in its infancy, so adjustments are made here and there with image sizes and typographical layout to prevent orphans, etc... All of these little tweaks result in database entries that are totally useless to me...
If space was virtually unlimited I agree this wouldn't be an issue, however I'm working with a 100MB database limit, and can already see that space is going to be important. Hopefully this is an option or a plug-in soon.
Posted 3 years ago #
I'm just starting out with WordPress, Love it btw, but found the auto-save is a big waste of space -- as many have noted. I have already entered in almost 2,300 blog entries in the last few months and already I have a database with over 13,000 records!! At the end, when I get the blog fully going with over 6,000 blog entries, I can picture the database to have way more than 33,000 wasted entries just setting there in the database wasting space.
There should be more options given on how to manage the auto-save or at least give the option to manually delete outdated auto-saved records.
Posted 3 years ago #
i also dislike the fact that every new post of mine has a +2/3 ID number compared to previous post.
i am also in favor of making it easier for the user to control the setting in the admin panel somewhere.
admin still has an option to use my-hacks.php! it is like ages old feature.
Posted 3 years ago #
What we can do here to show what this is doing with our records is to show here the total blog posts you have and then your latest record number for the last blog you made. Mine is at:
Blog Posts: 2,506
Last Blog ID: 13,577
There are at least 5 different revision control plugins. Use one. This isn't going to be in the core any time soon, because most of the developers don't see the point. Nor, in point of fact, do 99% of the people that use WordPress. Revisions have no downside except in extreme edge cases.
Here's a plugin to control revisions, if you actually want to do that: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/revision-control/
Use that.
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