Enable revision history for drafts

  • Unknown's avatar
    anteatereater · Member ·

    I know why you’re here and how you’ve found this post: you lost some content on a draft, you’re not sure how/why, and you thought there would be a revision history for drafts.

    There’s not.

    You’re going to need to rewrite whatever you had lost. We can be in despair together because I had lost 2 sections of writing :(

    Problem: revision history is enabled for posts that have been published, but not the drafts that have not been published.
    Idea: enable revision history for all writing–regardless of whether it is published or unpublished. It’s 2018 :(

    Needless to say, I will not be writing drafts using WordPress’s editor anymore. It’s a great editor through and through, but the missing revision history is a dealbreaker.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Problem: revision history is enabled for posts that have been published, but not the drafts that have not been published.

    This is not correct. From the moment the first autosave gets triggered on a draft post there is a revision history for the post.

    If you lost content from a draft post and there’s no revision history, it means autosave failed for some reason, the most likely culprit being your browser cache.

    When you are working on a draft and you see the word “Save” at the top of the editor, it means there is content in the draft that hasn’t been saved yet. You can either click on that text to manually trigger a save, or it should trigger automatically if you stop typing for more than a few seconds or if you alter anything in the settings panel for the post.

    At this point the text should change to Saving, and once the autosave completes it should change to Saved. At this point the History text will also appear, and you’ll be able to access previous saved versions of the draft there.

    If autosave doesn’t trigger at all, or if it triggers but gets stuck on Saving and never shows Saved, clearing your browser cache should fix this. However, please copy your draft into a text editor like Notepad before clearing the cache, just in case that action also causes the locally saved version of the draft in the browser itself to also be wiped.

    If after clearing your browser cache autosave and revision history is still not working correctly for you on draft posts, please let us know, and include a link to or the title of an affected draft post so we can take a closer look.

    Also note that your premium plan gives you access to live chat and email support where we can help you with issues like these.

    https://wordpress.com/help/contact

  • The topic ‘Enable revision history for drafts’ is closed to new replies.