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Working with Post Revisions in WordPress

WordPress 3.6 “Oscar” introduced a bunch of useful new features to make managing and publishing new content to your site that little bit easier. One such feature was a new user interface for post revisions making comparing versions of a post or rolling back to a particular point in time much more intuitive. Here’s a quick look at how it works.

To access the new UI simply navigate to an individual post and in the publish pane click on the “browse” link next to the revision count.

Described as a “time machine for your posts” the new revisions browser lets you scroll back and forth through every saved draft or published update of a post, comparing side by side with the current version.

The simple colour-coding lets you see what’s new (in green) and what’s been removed (in red), with any uncoloured content being the same between the two revisions. WordPress also shows you when and by who the changes were made, which can be handy if you’re working with multiple post authors. Once you’ve found the version you want to roll back to, simply hit the ‘Restore this Version’ button to, well, restore it.

There’s also a handy option to compare any two revisions side by side, which can be useful if you’re not sure what the difference between two versions of a post you could restore are. Enabling this option gives you two slider handles which you can move back and forth independently to select the two revisions you want to compare between.

See it in Action:

Nick Barron

Written by

Nick Barron

In his role as UX Director Nick ensures that everything we do reflects a clear understanding of our clients’ aims as well the expectations of their audiences.