Today I released my newest plugin, WP Revisons Control. Leveraging the updated Revisions experience in WordPress 3.6, my latest offering gives users control over how many revisions are stored for each post type. Prior to WordPress 3.6, the number of revisions saved could only be set universally, for all post types.
WP Revisions Control adds a simple interface to the Settings > Writing page of your WordPress Dashboard:
Why is this helpful? First, revisions are stored in the database, and if many are stored, can cause bloat. This bloat may lead to slower queries, which can have a noticeable performance impact. The preceding issues are really only concerns for sites with high traffic, and in situations where posts are edited many times, however.
Second, the value of these revisions depends on what is being tracked, and one’s desire to retain the full revision history. For example, I may want to store every revision of the posts I write, but only desire to keep the latest five versions of each page on my site. Starting in WordPress 3.6, this control is available. Since this is a power-user feature, WordPress doesn’t provide a native interface to specify revisions quantities, so I wrote this quick plugin to do so.
My primary contribution to WordPress 3.6 was the changes that make this plugin possible. I’ve been looking for a way to demonstrate what’s possible with the updated Revisions functionality, and this plugin seemed like a fun and useful way to do so.
Download the plugin at http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-revisions-control/ and contributed to its development at https://github.com/ethitter/WP-Revisions-Control.