WordPress Revision History to the Rescue

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(Uh, Jeff, Kelly, move on, nothing to read here.  Nothing of interest to you at all…really…)

I had one of those moments today.  Mistakes were made.  Bad mistakes.  The “oh crap, I’m editing on the production site, not the qa or dev server” type of mistakes that immediately have you picturing your career dissipation light suddenly burning bright.

So I noticed after working on this highly important site that I’d accidently overwritten something on the live site.  Yech.

Luckily, as of version 2.6, WordPress now has Revision History.  I’ve only used the feature a few times before, and then, only when I’d gotten to an unrecoverable point on a qa server.  So in I went, and there it was…the content I’d overwritten, waiting for me, like a girlfriend I’d done wrong…

Saved.  Career dissipation light dims to nothing.

Thank you WordPress…without that my next stop was going to be the Internet Archive…

Comments

4 responses to “WordPress Revision History to the Rescue”

  1. Esteban Avatar

    Had a few of this kinds of moments myself. It is good that WordPress has an “overly confident geek” revert function.

    1. Mark Cahill Avatar

      That’s exactly what it should be called. Of course we know that in what we do, experience matters. My initial thoughts had me with a list of things that might have fixed it:

      1. Revert via WordPress
      2. Grab a copy of the text from Google’s cached page.
      3. Grab a copy of the text from Internet Archive
      4. See if there’s a db backup somewhere

      True geeks will be saying right now “what do you mean IF there is a database backup…”

  2. Jeff Bennett Avatar

    Jeff here…the one mentioned in the post…it cool man. People are what build and curate sites. If it was easy…machines would do it all. So we make a mistake here and there…we fix them and move on.

  3. Mark Cahill Avatar

    Exactly…mistakes happen, and experience is often the best weapon we have to over come them.

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