Turn off “Post Revision”-feature

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.

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!

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! ??

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.

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

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.

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.