Post and Page Revisions is one of the features that comes in quite handy, during the editorial workflow. It helps track the time and author of each revision and restore a version when needed.
While the revisions interface displays the raw content with changes made, it does not have a preview feature out of the box. We saw that previewing the front-end appearance of these revisions would bring ease to the publishing workflow. As well as help editors make well-informed decisions on what to restore. So we developed a handy plugin WordPress Preview Revisions that serves just that.
Think of this plugin as a visual time machine for the content on your website. It comes in handy to analyze and streamline content publishing as you can see exactly how a post or page appeared across different revisions.
Versioning content with revisions
In any software system, the versioning process keeps track of different versions of the content. WordPress stores a record of each saved draft or published update, permanently in the database. These can be accessed through the Post and Page Revisions feature, enabling you to roll back changes on any post or page.
Introducing ‘WordPress Preview Revisions’
As shown below, dragging the slider or clicking the next/previous button on the nifty revisions interface, enables you to see the changes made in each version of post/page/post types. You can observe the changes made over a period of time, as it facilitates a timeline review of content modifications. But you cannot see how the older version looks on the website before actually restoring it.
We noticed that this was a pain point for editorial workflows during web publishing. Especially for content and image-dense web pages, restoring a previous version could mean a lot of back and forth. So we at rtCamp developed this plugin that adds a “Preview” button on the revision screen. Now you can conveniently preview any available revision, and see how it fits in with your current layout, before restoring it. You can find the installation guide in the repo.
There’s more! We have submitted the WordPress Preview Revisions as a functionality in the core ticket. If this gets merged into the core, it will be an integral feature of WordPress and you will no longer need to install this plugin.
Conclusion
Go ahead and try our solution made public for use on your WordPress website and comment your hot takes below. Feel free to contribute by raising pull requests. Discover how our Migration to WordPress services can bring better web publishing solutions for you. Or drop us a line, if you would like to explore interesting features we can help roll out to your web property.
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