Revision control in WordPress
September 17, 2009 at 3:57 PM by Dr. Drang
I’m sure this is old hat to many if not all of you, but I’m posting it anyway, so I have a reference to it. Somewhere around version 2.6, WordPress added a Revisions feature. Each time you revise a post, a new database entry is made and all the older versions are kept. The idea was to be able to see the revisions as you would in a wiki. Not a bad idea for some blogs, I’m sure, but not anything I care about.
In fact, I actively dislike the feature, because it means that sequential posts will no longer have sequential post numbers. Although I don’t use post numbers in my normal permalinks, I do use them with the Twitter comment system and I like them to be sequential.
When I updated the blog from 2.3 to 2.8.4 a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t know anything about the revision system, so when I saw the post numbers incrementing by two or three or four instead of one, I worried that the blog database had been hacked in some way. A bit of Googling led me to both the explanation and the solution. I added the line
define(’WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);
to my wp-config.php file just before writing this post. Presumably, the post numbering will be sequential from now on.
