[Ver­sion fran­çaise]

Revi­sion Tra­cker is an exten­sion pro­du­cing a detai­led his­to­ry of modi­fi­ca­tions of posts and/or pages on a Word­Press web­site. You can check its ope­ra­tion by cli­cking link (which will open a new tag).

Since the code is tri­lin­gual, ins­truc­tions appear in the browser’s default lan­guage (English/French/Spanish).

Revi­sion Tra­cker does not only dis­play the latest changes. If you find a but­ton “«” at the top left of a com­pa­ri­son page, click it to search for ear­lier ver­sions. Ulti­ma­te­ly you may see all changes that have been sto­red in the data­base.

Only changes occur­ring in texts are taken into account. The engine ignores text for­mat­ting, image contents and their cap­tions, as well as forms and imbed­ded scripts.

The fol­lo­wing default search para­me­ters are used :

• Texts in pro­gress for the past … days selects the per­iod of che­cking modi­fi­ca­tions. The higher this value, the more posts or pages will be scree­ned, and com­pu­ta­tion time will also increase. Default value is 20 days.
• Changes over … hours is the time reso­lu­tion for com­pa­ring ver­sions. By default 12 hours. A lower value will dis­play more steps of modi­fi­ca­tions. Steps occur when the edi­tor clicks the “Save” but­ton of the Word­Press edi­tor.
• Mini­mum mis­match bet­ween ver­sions … chars dis­cards ver­sions in which the chan­ged length ver­sus the cur­rent ver­sion is less than this value. Set­ting this para­me­ter and the pre­ce­ding one to zero makes it pos­sible to screen all ver­sions. Default value is 50 cha­rac­ters.
• Per­cen­tage of simi­la­ri­ty bet­ween para­graphs is a para­me­ter for the ali­gn­ment of para­graphs on com­pa­ri­son pages. Default value of 70% looks fair.
• Dis­play all para­graph hea­ders makes it pos­sible to opt for a full dis­play of para­graph hea­ders (the­re­by high­ligh­ting the loca­tion of a change) or for a com­pact dis­play (the one by default).

You can assi­gn dif­ferent values to all these search para­me­ters. Fill the form at the bot­tom of the Modi­fi­ca­tions page and click but­ton “SEARCH AGAIN WITH THESE SETTINGS”.

By default, Word­Press stores all ver­sions of posts and pages in its data­base which ends up over­si­zed ! To avoid this disas­ter, I ins­tal­led the won­der­ful “Opti­mize Data­base” plu­gin allo­wing to fix the maxi­mum num­ber of ver­sions or/and the time during which these shall be pre­ser­ved in the data­base. On this site the 30-day option is used.

History of a single page/post

On the right of each page/post a but­ton “His­to­rique de cette page” pro­duces a com­pa­ra­tive dis­play of all ver­sions of the page/post. You will be promp­ted to solve a small arith­me­tic pro­blem to get per­mis­sion… This is meant to dis­cou­rage robots from satu­ra­ting the site !

Try it :

In this pro­cess, ver­sions are com­pa­red over 12-hour ranges. By default, para­graph hea­ders are not dis­played unless they contain changes. To get a full dis­play click the ‘▼’ on top of the page. Cli­cking the ‘▲’ but­ton will return to the mini­mum dis­play.

If you are an admin of the web­site, Revi­sion Tra­cker will offer you the option of dele­ting revi­sions so that silly mis­takes will no lon­ger appear in the his­to­ry.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

Revi­sion Tra­cker has an option to create/update the RSS feed^N1 of its host web­site. This option is active on LeBonheurEstPossible.org. The address of the feed is https://lebonheurestpossible.org/feed.

RSS feed pro­duc­tion is laun­ched while pro­du­cing the detai­led his­to­ry of modi­fi­ca­tions of posts and/or pages if the cur­rent field is older than 6 hours. The­re­fore, the items it contains are all posts dis­played on page “Modi­fi­ca­tions récentes”, in the same order.

The feed is in RSS ver­sion 2.0 for­mat. Cur­rent­ly, no sty­ling page (XSL) is atta­ched and no spe­ci­fic names­pace is invo­ked. The­re­fore, a few brow­sers will dis­play it as a raw XML file.

Each item contains the title, link, des­crip­tion and guid fields of a post. The pub­Date field contains the date of its latest change : the feed is expec­ted to noti­fy signi­fi­cant­ly modi­fied posts rather than just new­ly crea­ted ones. The enclo­sure field contains a link to the fea­ture image of the post, if any. Fields label­led cate­go­ry are used to list cate­go­ries and tags of the des­cri­bed post, except the ones men­tio­ned in a rejec­tion list.

More about this extension…

A few pages and posts are denied access to his­to­ry in order to meet pri­va­cy issues.

Revi­sion Tra­cker does not alter the content of the Word­Press data­base excepts when it updates the content of page “Modi­fi­ca­tions récentes”. It stores its com­pa­ri­son files in a tem­po­ra­ry fol­der that may be auto­ma­ti­cal­ly dele­ted after 30 minutes of idling. In prac­tice you should click again after 30 minutes !

I desi­gned this exten­sion in April 2020 after unsuc­cess­ful­ly loo­king for a plu­gin or a Word­Press fea­ture that would high­light recent modi­fi­ca­tions and construct his­to­ries of ver­sions — much like Wiki­pe­dia. Sad­ly, most devices I have seen were only signa­ling recent post crea­tions. 🙁

Com­pa­ri­sons bet­ween texts are based on tri­cky string algo­rithms — my favo­rite play­ground during the past cen­tu­ry ! 😀

▷ Liens

🔵  Notes pour la ver­sion papier :
- Les iden­ti­fiants de liens per­mettent d’atteindre faci­le­ment les pages web aux­quelles ils font réfé­rence.
- Pour visi­ter « 0bim », entrer dans un navi­ga­teur l’adresse « https://leti.lt/0bim ».
- On peut aus­si consul­ter le ser­veur de liens https://leti.lt/liens et la liste des pages cibles https://leti.lt/liste.

• N1 · sx5w · Real­ly Simple Syn­di­ca­tion (RSS) – Wiki­pe­dia