I'm sure that there are many of you out there who are currently using WordPress 2.7, and have noticed that everytime you post does and autosave, it creates a new revision of your post in the wp_posts table of your database. Well I know that I have noticed it, and I just did a check of my main website, which has just 17 posts, and one page, but the wp_posts table has 126 entries, of which the excessive posts were caused by the revisions feature included in WordPress 2.6.
I noticed on the WordPress Support section, that a number of people have taken a dislike to this feature, especially the fact that it doesn't have an option within the Admin section to disable this feature. However there are ways to combat this, and they are part of the advanced configuration of WordPress.
In you wp-config.php page, you can simply add the line:
define(’WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);
and once this has been added, the only entries in the wp_posts table will be posts, pages, and any media files you have added.
Further more, if you wish to remove the excess of revision posts in the table, simply run the following command:
DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";
through the mySQL command prompt, or in PHPmyAdmin, and all revision entries will be removed, it is advisable to backup your database before running this line of code though.
As we can see, it is possible to turn the post revisions feature of WordPress off, although it does require us to dig into the WordPress files, and add a line, but for those of us, who create minimal entries, and don't want to store revisions of those posts, these simple edits will make our lives slightly easier.
January 5th, 2009 at 11:04 am
VERY COOL info. Already did what you said in the post. 46 un-needed revision entries now gone.
Thanks!
I’ll be posting about your post
David Porter
January 5th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
It amuses me that the WordPress codex says that Post Revisions are an “awesome feature” and suggests that someone’s mental for not wanting them clogging up their database.
Rather than delete the lines, I turned my revisions into draft posts that I could recycle. It’s not as clean as outright deleting them.
January 5th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Thanks David & Allyn for your comments.
Personally, I hate the thought of WordPress creating a table row every 2 minutes for a post that I haven’t editted, nor probably will edit. It just makes the database very large. I have heard that the older the blog is (thus more posts), the slower WordPress became, even without revision posts to sort through, it just seems silly to enable revision by default.
Allow people to add revision usage if they wish, but don’t force it upon us.
January 5th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
I understand your concerns on this topic but I am sure that you will appreciate the importance of revisions when you will need to restore a page / post to a previous version. This is most possible when you are using WordPress as your company’s CMS.
Personally, I would prefer WordPress to store as revisions only the manual saves and to ignore the autosaves, since it would serve in a better way the above scenario and would significantly eliminate the stored revisions.
On the other hand, disabling completely the revisions might not be the option that someone is looking for. At the moment, there is an interesting plugin out there called “Revision Control” http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/revision-control/ . Give it try
January 5th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
I’ve got nothing against storing the revisions, I’m just thinking that there are some of us who are not likely to use the revision system by default, and it would be much better if it was an optional setting in the control panel, thats all. I have seen that plugin that you have referred to, I personally won’t find any use for it as I have disabled the use of storing revisions on this blog.
January 6th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
I think I agree with Iacovos Constantinou regarding manual save revisions vs auto save revisions. I can definitely see an advantage of keeping revisions in the event I need to refer to an older train of thought or to restore a post.
Question: if I add, “define(’WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);” will that then cause posts I’m writing not to auto save or manually save at all?
January 6th, 2009 at 11:40 pm
My understanding is that the autosave feature still works, so basically you have two copies of a post, the autosave, and the final published post. Without that line of code, you add a new row to the revisions table every two minutes that you are editting/writing a post. I have since found out that you can control how many revisions of a post you store in the database as well as removing the functionality all together.
January 16th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Thank you so much for this! I have a client who has gone through so much re-thinking on every post that there was very quickly a huge list of revisions. Tried this out and it worked perfectly!
February 7th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
Still want a way to disable this in PAGES too. WP_PAGE_REVISIONS does not work