What Were They Thinking?
What are the thought processes of the WordPress developers? How did the developers come up with their absolutely bizarre version numbering system where a major change in their database tables only qualifies as version 2.3 rather than 3.0? What nonsense will they come up with next?
Apparently they think that imitating Wikipedia would be a good idea.
Revision Management
One of the new features of WordPress 2.6 is revision management. Some programs provide for backing up different versions of the same document. And, on WordPress blogs where more than one editor can edit the same document it would allow you to restore to an earlier version with implications of Wikipedia’s thought police.
Revision Management Eats Up Space
But for the vast majority of blogs, WordPresses revision management system is only going to eat up tons of storage space. Thankfully, you have two basic options: #1-Turn it off completely, or #2-Limit the number of document versions that you are going to maintain. And, on top of those copies WordPress is now automatically backing everything up every 60 seconds with what they call an autocopy.
Rather than simply adding it as an option to be selected under their settings tab, the WordPress developers apparently feared mass revolt against this unwanted change. So, you are required to state your preferences in the wp-config.php file which is loaded in the root directory of your blog. Simply add the following two lines of code to turn off both options completely.
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’,false); // Do NOT keep any version backups
define(‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’,false); // Do NOT Autoback at all
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’); // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’); // Your MySQL username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
Or, add these two lines to limit the number of copies being made.
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’,3); //Keep a maximum of 3 different versions
define(‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’,600); //Autoback up every ten minutes
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’); // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’); // Your MySQL username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
Remove Revisions Plugin
Now, that leaves the question of what to do with all those different version backups that have dramatically increased the size of your WordPress database? The easy way to get rid of them is to use the Remove Revisions plugin, version 1.0 by John Hennessy.
John H. Gohde says, never say never. One day, a disaster might just happen. So, a few version revisions might just come in handy. But, in most cases once a post has been written and is exceptable John doesn’t need any version backups. So, he periodically runs the remove revisions plugin to dramatically cutback on the size of his WordPress database.
