The “Post Revisions” Feature on WordPress

This is a guest post by Satish G.. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

When we get into trouble we usually start looking for a solution outside, and more often than not it is under our finger tip!

I want to share my own experience with you today, and perhaps let you know about a very useful WordPress feature that you hadn’t used before.

Some days ago I published an article titled 60+ Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers, and later on I found that it had a spelling mistake. So I edited the article to fix the spelling and hit the “Update post” button. To my despair, on that day my Internet connection was acting wildly, and hence my browser got frozen….

I had alread tweeted about the article, and suddenly people started reporting to me that the URL of the post was blank. Basically when I tried to update the article with the spelling mistake fixed the whole thing got erased!

I got frustrated, as I had invested a lot of time to write that article. With frustration, I started looking all over to get some solution to restore the article.

The content of the article was even missing in my Feedburner feed, and the Feedburner email had not been delivered yet, so those were of no help.

The Solution

After some time, and with some luck, I found that WordPress itself had a feature to solve my problem. It is called “Post Revisions,” and it is basically keeps track of all the revisions that are made to your posts, allowing you to restore a particular one if necessary.

If you somehow lose one of your articles, just click on the latest Post Revision (with the help of date and time the article have been saved). Click on it to see the details like article title, content, and everything that has been saved previously. If it’s not the record that you were looking for, then you can select another Post Revision.

When you finally get the required post, just click on the restore button and the article will be restored and everything will work normally. And there is a tool to compare revisions too, which can be of some help if you have many of them.

Caution: this tip does not work when the whole article along with the URL is deleted. In such case you can contact your hosting company support team to get the recent backup file. If you are lucky enough, you will get the article back.

You can read more from Satish on TechnoTip.org, where he blogs about technology and the Internet.