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Jul
07
2009
The Best Content Versioning in Joomla
Written by Steve Burge   
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gcr_prod_boxDuring the last few weeks I've been working on taking our Joomla training classes online and we've been sending out a free weekly newsletter with Joomla tips and tricks. Last week, I decided to spend some time answering two really common questions:

  • "What happens if someone makes a mistake in an article? How can we roll back to a previous version?"
  • "We have a legal requirement to track the articles that appear on our website - how do we do that?"

The answer is "versioning" and there's quite a few solutions out there. Over the last few weeks I've tried all the available versioning extensions available for Joomla and one stood head and shoulders above the others. Its free, its easy and its called "Content Revision". Here's how to set it up:

  • Step 1: Visit Galore.co.za and scroll down to "Galore Content Revision".
  • Step 2: For Joomla 1.0, download that version. For Joomla 1.5 you'll need to download the component and also the plugin.
  • Step 3: In the administration area of your Joomla site, go to Extensions >> Install / Uninstall and upload the files. If you're using Joomla 1.5, go to Extensions >> Plugin Manager and make sure the plugin is published.
  • Step 4: Go to Content >> Article Manager and edit an article.
  • Step 5: Go to Components >> Content Revision >> List New Changes. The change you just made should appear in the list.
  • Step 6: To see the changes, click on the number in the "CR ID" column. You'll be able to see the "Before" and "After" Versions.
  • Step 7: If you want to roll back to the previous version, make sure you are on the "Before Save" tab and click the green, circular arrows in the top-right corner.

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Comments  

 
#1 Victor Drover 2009-07-08 14:57
I received errors on the backend using this. Waiting for forum response.
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#2 Steve Burge 2009-07-08 17:11
Hey Vic

Remember what the error was?
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#3 Victor Drover 2009-07-08 19:56
http://galore.co.za/index.php?option=com_joobb&view=topic&topic=63&Itemid=89
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#4 Paul McCann 2009-07-09 08:37
I see there is a new component out called Jwiki which seems to have versioning system for content.

Info is a little sparse though, and I only saw it an hour ago, but maybe something else to consider
http://www.azrul.com/products/joomla-wiki.html
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#5 Steve Burge 2009-07-09 08:43
Thanks Paul

A blog post out-of-date in one day :sad:

One thing to be careful of ... this version of JWiki doesn't uninstall plugins when you take it uninstall - that crashes the site.
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#6 Bobby Thanepohn 2010-08-25 14:48
After using this product for a year, I have discovered a fatal flaw.

It is important for me to keep my content revisions on-hand and accessible. Not for rollback purposes but rather for legal requirements.

The tool had done a great job-I could pull up published content from virtually any past date if asked to. But now a year into it (and about 900 revisions later) the script execution is taking too long when requesting to see all changes. I am required to see "all" if I want to see any changes beyond 100 given there is no selectable date range.

I have reset the execution limit in my PHP.ini file and that does the trick but I had to set up limit to 600 seconds.

Not good.

Any thoughts on how to store content revisions another way?

I am now going to export all the DB data
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