Scott Rosenberg has recently been making a case that web sites (news sites, at least, but I think the argument applies more broadly) should make the revision history of stories public. Which makes sense to me, and to enough other people that a Post Revision Display WordPress plugin is now available.
Which I’ve just turned on, as an experiment, so you’ll see a little “Post Revisions” note at the bottom of my blog posts. At least for the time being; I almost never revise my posts once I hit the ‘publish’ button, so it’s mostly noise. I fiddled with the styling to make it pretty inconspicuous, but I’m still not convinced it’s pulling its weight; so don’t be shocked if you come back a month from now and those messages are gone. Here’s an example of a post where I actually made changes, if you’re curious what that looks like.
At any rate, it seems like a clearly good idea in general; hopefully it will catch on enough to get incorporated into WordPress proper, at which point theme makers will find ways to present that information in a less obtrusive fashion. Actually, right now it would probably be fine if I could get it to go after the publication date; taking a look, that seems not brain-dead easy, but maybe I’ll be able to find a way to do that without too much patching.
Post Revisions:
This post has not been revised since publication.
Posts
I’ve updated the plugin with a “manual” mode to allow you to specify in the theme where different parts go, but still need to update instructions and make a new release. But you can get an early look by downloading the dev version 0.6 here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/post-revision-display/download
The three functions to call:
the_revision_note_prd()
the_revision_list_prd()
the_revision_diffs()
I think typically people will want to place the_revision_note above the_content, but if not, and if none of these get called before the_content, then you’d have to call prd_set_manual_mode() before the content so that it won’t assume “automatic” mode.
8/15/2010 @ 7:17 pm
Thanks so much, it’s working great! (For anybody else following these instructions, the last function should be the_revision_diffs_prd(), as you’d expect.)
8/15/2010 @ 7:41 pm
Cool. Thanks for trying it out. And I think it does look better on your site with the list below the meta info.
(And I’ve updated wordpress.org and my site with the new version and documentation.)
8/16/2010 @ 6:11 pm
Great, thanks!
8/16/2010 @ 7:44 pm