jeremyrandall /

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

I noticed recently (September 2008) that one of my Wordpress sites had started skipping post numbers. It used to just go in order… 1, 2, 3 onward as expected. Suddenly post numbers were incrementing several at a time, seemingly randomly. What’s up with that?

I started looking around and found the database had multiple entries per post. A little more digging and I realized that Wordpress 2.6 had added versioning (is “revisioning” a word?). Each time a draft was saved, Wordpress would save it as a new entry with the post_type set to “revision” (versus “post” for the final version) and the database would increment the id by one. Mystery solved.

Versioning can be really valuable — it’s a key feature of content management systems and wikis — but for some of my blogs I only want my final version to be saved and available. So, how to turn it off?

In wp-config.php, simply add the following line to turn off revisions:


define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);


On a related note, autosaves can add extra posts in the database. A workaround is setting a high interval for autosaves, in wp-config.php:


define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL',600);


Once you have these changes in place you may remove revisions that have already been saved in the database by issuing the following command within mysql:


delete from wp_posts where post_type = "revision";


Before you do that, though, you may wish to list all the entries that are set as revisions:


select ID, post_title from wp_posts where post_type = 'revision';


And compare them to the entries set as posts:


select ID, post_title from wp_posts where post_type = 'post';