Clarify revisions UI to better indicate what version you are viewing and restoring.

[lwoods]

(Title revised to clarify issue.)

This is a fairly common scenario. A user makes some significant changes to a post and then clicks Update. Realizing that a mistake was made, the user goes to Revisions. His previous post contents are there, along with the changes, BUT the Restore this Revision is inactive. You can't restore an immediate Update! To do so, you must return to the post, make another change, and Update. When you go to Revisions, your immediate change is shown again. Now, go to Previous Revision. There, you find the post where you made the initial mistake. NOW, go to the next Previous Revision. There is the original post from before you started making changes. The Restore previous Revision is active, and you can perform the restore. This is a bug in WordPress! The immediate updated post should be available for restoration. It is not!

[adamsilverstein]

Hi @lwoods - thanks for the ticket.

I tried to give this a test. When I land on the revisions screen, the changes being shown are for the current post. That's why I can't "restore" it - it is already the same as the current post. Going "back" one revision and restoring, the post is brought back to the last updated state.

Is this not the behavior you were expecting?

Maybe I have missed a step in your instructions, to be clear here is what I did:

1. create a new post and publish it.
2. add some test "my first change" and update
3. add more test "another change" and update
4. go to revisions - the first revision shows the changes in the current state, namely the addition of the "another change" text.
5. go to the previous revision and click restore.
6. the post is now at the state I saved it in at step 2. the "another change" text has been removed.

One possible point of confusion: the revision screen shows what was added and removed in each revision (not the current state of the revision).

Let me know if I missed something, otherwise I would say this is working as expected.

[lwoods]

Hi, Adam,

I now see how to retrieve the revision, but IMHO, it is not apparent and should be "corrected." What WordPress says is the last revision is not a retrievable previous revision. To get the last revision restored, you need to go back TWO revision "pages." Again, IMHO, the revision displayed when you hit the Revisions: Browse link should display the last changes, and you should be able to restore this revision. Anyway, I figured out how to get the "proper" revision. Thanks for taking the time to work on my problem.

[lwoods]

Step-by-step use of Revisions

[adamsilverstein]

Thanks @lwoods - I'm going to close this as "works for me", however please note that your struggles with the revisions screen are not being ignored, there is already a plan underway (although currently a low priority) to redo the revisions functionality outlined here: ​https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/07/05/revisions/

[joedolson]

I think that there are some relatively simple user interface changes we could make to clarify this. While it's not a complete reworking of revisions, it would help resolve this kind of confusion. I'm going to reopen this to explore this.