Post Version Control

Posts can be grouped in many ways in WordPress but there is no direct version control system. This plugin offers a lightweight solution if you want version control for a group of posts.

To make this work you define a keyword for each version control group you want to create. Then use that keyword as a prefix in the post name of each post in that group. The plugin will sort out the latest post automatically and label the rest as outdated.

It also let’s you have a URL that will always point to the latest post of that version control group. That way you can give out the URL to others and be sure that your visitors will always be viewing the most recent post.

This plugin will automatically:

• Define if a post is part of a version control group.
• Search and locate the latest post by publish date.
• Label the older posts of the group as outdated.

This is especially practical for bloggers that often revisit older subjects and have to do the linking with the updated posts manually. Or if you are like me and publish material that has versioning applied to it (ex. software) through a blogging platform.

Usage

First thing you should do is visit the plugin’s options page (“Settings” -> “Post Version Control”).

There you will find two fields:

1. The keyword list field, where you enter all the keywords you want to track seperated from each other by a comma and a space “, “. Each of them defines a different version control group.

2. The path for the latest posts URL. By default the path is “/current”. So if we have a keyword named “ajax” the URL: http://www.myblogaddress.com/current/ajax will point to the latest post of the “ajax” group.

To link a post to a version control group of posts all you need to do is enter the keyword of that group as a prefix to the post_name of that post. So in the group “ajax” mentioned earlier all posts in that group should start with the “ajax-” prefix. An example list of that group of posts might be:

1. ajax-first-post
2. ajax-updated-version
3. ajax-latest-news

..and so on.

The plugin will automatically look through your posts of the same group and label the older ones by inserting an <!– outdated –> tag. This is replaced by the content of “outdated.html” in runtime. This is an example of how you can style your outdated tag. Just insert it along with your other styles:

<style>

p.outdated{
border: dashed 1px #f00;
background: #eee;
color: #f00;
text-align: center;
}

p.outdated a {
color: #f00;
}

</style>

Uninstalling should be pretty easy too. The only left overs are the <!– outdated: … –> comments in the old posts content which of course are ignored when viewing the webpage. If you don’t mind that you don’t have to do anything else apart from de-activating the plugin through your WordPress administration.

License

This work is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.txt