Disable and Delete Wordpress Post Revisions

Freelance blogging publisher and design expert, Kim Woodbridge, discusses one of the potentially confusing aspects of the current version of the Wordpress blogging software – post revisions. Ever since version 2.6 (we’re currently at 2.7.1) the software keeps a copy of all the modified versions of each post you write, which can add up to a lot of space used needlessly in your Wordpress MySQL database in a very short time if you’re a prolific blogger or simply like to tweak your posts a lot before publishing.

Thankfully, Kim runs through a wp-config.php hack to disable post revisions that will save a lot of heartache if you’re on a limited hosting account.

She also points out that there is a plugin – WP Post Control – that can do the job of disabling revisions (as well as a few other things) for the fainthearted who don’t fancy editing core WP files by hand.

Using the plugin route has the added benefit of not having to remember that you modified the file when you upgrade or have to restore from a backup of your wp-config.php file. So, I ran the plugin and disabled post revisions and made the non-Flash uploaded default for adding images to my posts too. One thing I noticed, however, is that it does not remove post revisions from old posts.

For that you will need the plugin Delete Revision, which as the name suggests allows you to find all the posts with at least one revision copy, and delete them all with just a couple of clicks. There were almost 2000 post revisions on Sciencetext, now cleared out. If you’ve disabled post revisions, you can safely uninstall Delete Revision once you’ve done that.