I save my work constantly, so it’s dumb that accidentally saving a truncated post should wipe out hours and hours of work.

So I searched around on the internet and found the WordPress Versioning Plugin, which I downloaded and immediately installed.

Unfortunately, the plugin didn’t work.

So I’ve been tinkering around with it for a few hours, and I’ve fixed it.

You can download the new plugin module here:

http://benjismith.net/files/wp-versioning.tar.gz

Here are the changes I made:

Bugs Fixed:

• The PHP was coded with the assumption that REGISTER_GLOBALS would be set to TRUE. That’s a dumb assumption, so I changed the code to use the $HTTP_GET_VARS global array.
• For any querystring parameters, I’m now using mysql_escape_chars() to prevent SQL injection attacks.

Better UI:

• More aesthetically-pleasing table layout.
• Betterly-named column headers
• Snapshots are now displayed in a format that preserves both the html markup and the newlines in the post, making it a little easier to choose which snapshot to rollback to.

New Features:

• It’s now possible to delete snapshots, to keep from clogging up the database with a bunch of unnecessary snapshots

I’ve decided to call the new version 19.2 (which, you’ve got to admit, is a significant upgrade from the original author’s 1.0 Beta version).

At some point, I may implement a better visual diff, so that sequential snapshots are easier to differentiate. For now, I’m not too concerned. I’m just happy that my posts will no longer suffer from mistaken deletions, either due to bugs in the WordPress software itself or because of one of those pesky ‘Problem Between Chair And Keyboard’ bugs.

If you have any questions, let me know.

I just finished writing a blog post that I’ve been working on for the last three days (total time writing and editing: about 3.5 hours).

As an afterthought, I decided to paste a funny image into the body of the post, so I uploaded the image using the controls on the ‘post.php’ page. After clicking on the thumbnail and choosing ‘Send to Editor’, the image was pasted into the text, and I published the article.

I was redirected to the publicly-viewable page containing the new article, only to discover that the last 75% of the text in my message had completely disappeared.

Ugh.

I tried clicking the BACK button in FireFox to retrieve any previous version of my post, but despite FireFox’s current memory consumption (236,340 KB of RAM, ostensibly used for caching of pages in the HISTORY), all of the historic versions of my post had been replaced with the new truncated version.

Shit.

Now there’s nothing left for me to do but re-write.

Maybe I’ll get to it tomorrow. Maybe not.

In the mean time, I think I’ll install the WordPress Versioning Plugin, so that in the future, when this inevitably happens again, I can just perform a rollback.