The Revisionary Plugin lets you schedule revisions to live posts so that you can make time-sensitive edits now and have the plugin release them at the ideal time in the future.
Two common uses for this type of feature are:
- When you’re doing a promotion and you need your shopping cart or checkout page to change at a certain time. For example, your sale ends at Midnight and you need to the sales page to update to say the sale is over. Instead of staying up until Midnight to do that you can set the Revisionary Plugin to do it for you.
- You are publishing a series of posts on different days, but they need to link to each other. You can create the posts and the revisions to live at the appropriate times so you don’t have the go back and add the links (or forget to) at the appropriate time.
Revisionary plugin settings
Once you install and activate the Revisionary Plugin you will see a new menu item under the Settings menu.
The only setting that we ever change is the Pending Revisions setting. This setting inserts an extra step where after a revision is submitted it has to be approved by an editor or an admin before the revision can be scheduled.
It is on by default, which is good for websites that have multiple writers, an editor and an approval process. For blogs where you only have one writer (probably yourself) the pending revisions options is a pain. Most of the client work we do this setting is turned off.
Once you have the settings where you want them you can start scheduling revisions.
Let’s walk through how the revision plugin works
Step 1: Write a post and schedule it or publish it immediately as you normally would.
Step 2: Then, once scheduled or published add something to that same post and schedule it for a time after the scheduled release and make sure to check the save as pending revision box and then click Schedule Revision.
Step 3: After you click Schedule Revision you’ll be taken to a page with 3 links. Choose one of the three links to follow. The link name is pretty self-explanatory.
In this example we’re going to click the “Return to Edit Posts” link.
Step 4: When you go back to the “Post Listings” page you will see you original article and a scheduled revision (or multiple scheduled revisions):
If you have lots of revisions scheduled it can really clutter up your post list page. The good news is once a post revision is released it disappears from the post list and eventually only the original is left.
Step 5: To make more revisions to be released in the future edit the original post and start from step 1 again.
That’s all there is to it. Please let me know in the comments if you run into any problems using this plugin or if you have other ideas for how to use it aside from the two I listed above!