August 27, 2009Wordpress Updated, Post Revisions Turned Off
Comments (3)
I updated to the most recent release of Wordpress this morning. One of the features that had caused me to delay my upgrade was the post revision feature. I do a lot of revisions as I work on posts, and I really don’t care about keeping notes along the way. It just clutters up my database with unneeded content. I am not an editor. 
I don’t want to keep a history of changes made over the life of a post. Some of my posts exist as drafts for months and go through dozens of writing sessions before they’re ready to be published.
So as I was going through the upgrade I did a bit of reading on the web and found an article that discussed an option named WP_POST_REVISIONS that can be added to the Wordpress configuration file. The setting cannot be configured via the Admin panel which I think is an oversight. However, it is quite flexible.
The first option is to turn the post revision feature completely off, which is done with this:
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);
Next, the value can be turned on (which is already the default) using:
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', true);
Finally, if the value is on the blog owner can limit the number of revisions that are stored using the following format:
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5);
I found an interesting statement on the Wordpress codex that I found detailing this option.
Revisions are stored in the posts table. I don’t yet know what kind of impact that will have on post queries. We’re going to turn the switch to “on” on WordPress.com sometime soonish and we’ll have a better idea about what kind of damage, if any, it does.
I found this… disturbing. In comparison, the phpBB developer group tests all of their code at phpbb.com, which is certainly one of the largest and most active phpBB boards on the planet. I would have preferred that the Wordpress developers have done performance testing for this feature before inflicting it on the rest of us.
But at least I know how to turn it off now.
Related Links
- Wordpress codex entry about WP_POST_REVISIONS
Comments (3)
I’m trying to figure out how this Wordpress revision thing applies to phpBB. :-/
Comment by Dog Cow — August 27, 2009 @ 10:32 am
It’s in the last paragraph.
Comment by Dave Rathbun — August 27, 2009 @ 9:42 pm
Very slight.
Comment by Dog Cow — August 28, 2009 @ 3:15 pm