Video Transcript
Hey, y’all. Welcome to another WordPress Wednesday.
My name’s Kori Ashton here at WebTegrity in beautiful San Antonio, Texas. Today I want to walk you through how to undo mistakes inside of your Pages or Posts of WordPress.
A lot of times you already know maybe how to do a Control Z or a Command Z for the Undo options inside of WordPress if maybe you’re working on a page and you just want to revert back. But, what if you’ve already clicked Update or Publish? And it’s live to the world and you realize, “Oh. No! I’ve totally made a mistake. And I’m missing something or I messed up a bit of code.” How do you get back? How do you revert back? There are revisions inside of your WordPress database. And I’m going to show you how to get to them.
Before we get started I want to mention these incredible three resources you see here on your screen. WP Engine. WP Elevation. And WP101. If you’re using WordPress, you need to be aware of all three of these incredible resources. WP Engine offers amazing WordPress hosting. They have a staging environment, too. So if you want to tinker around with your website and maybe try something new on it, you can play in an entire staging environment before it ever goes live to the world. And then, with just one click, one click, it goes live. Really super cool environment there.
WP Elevation. If you’re an entrepreneur, a freelancer, or trying to start your own business with WordPress, or trying to do your best to land new clients, you need to check out their tracks. They have amazing resources over there for you from marketing and business strategies. And, they’ve just asked me become one of their guest bloggers. So starting this month in July 2015 you’re going to start seeing some of my writing over there inside of their Blog Resource area. So be sure to check that out.
And WP101. If you love video resources like this for WordPress you need to click the link below in the description box, jump over to WP101, and check out their incredible free and paid library resource for you. Okay. All right. Those are my incredible resources for you. Great tips to share.
Today…I’m going to shrink down here…because we’ve all had this problem happen. I guarantee you. All of us have been tinkering around inside of a Page. We’re just writing. We’re inspired. And all of a sudden we click Publish or Update and, “Oh. Man! I should have clicked Preview to be sure I didn’t mess something up.” Or, “What did I mess up? I’ve worked for so long now, I can’t even remember what I might have accidentally made a mistake with.” Especially if you’re inside of this Text tab here, instead of the Visual mode.
It’s very very easy to accidentally delete a little big of nerd code. If you’re not a nerd code writer, sometimes it’s tricky to figure out what you might have messed up, right? So, how do you get back? How do you revert back? I want to show you too little areas.
One is right here above my screen. It says Revisions: 11. You can click this Browse button right here. This is typically going to be found only in updated versions of WordPress. If I click this Browse button (let me check it out and see what screen you go to here). Now you’ve got this kind of before version and then your current version. This before version right here shows you—it kind of highlights, “Uh oh! Kori. You had an end frame tag here on the iframe, which is my video that I must have accidentally removed because notice right here, it’s not on this side.”
Well, that end frame tag actually closes the video and tells the browser the video is done. If you accidentally remove that, it can totally mess up your Page. So I want to show you what my Page looks like right now.
It’s absolutely broken because there’s supposed to be a sidebar over here on the right side and there’s a really long article of text that sits down below this but because I accidentally removed this end frame tag, the whole Page is broken. I can restore it simply by [pressing] Restore This Version. What we want to do is choose this version. And let’s go back here.
That’s the version we want to be at, right, because this is the correct one now. I’m going to click Restore This Version. Now it’s going to leave this screen. We’re going to go back to the page (that’s what I’m actually working in right now—not a Post but a Page— and it really functions the same way though) and you can see here that it has gone ahead and written the nerd code for me. I can click Update now.
I’m going to go back to the front side of my website, to the mistake looking Page, and I’m going to click refresh. And let’s see. I should have… Here’s my sidebar back. Good. Ah. Goodness. And then here’s all my text. That is a really long article that I did not want to rewrite, right?
So that’s one way that you can undo mistakes inside of WordPress. Another thing you can do is, if you don’t see this little option over here for revisions, there is this cool little drawer that happens right up here at the top of your Pages or Posts that’s called Screen Options.
Open that little drawer up by clicking on it and there should be a box for Revisions. You can check that. Zip up that drawer again. And then I want you to slide down to the bottom of the Page because now you’re actually going to have this area. Revisions. And it will tell you all the different times that your Page was saved.
This is an auto save. So even inside of WordPress, it does an auto save for you which is a phenomenal resource especially if you’re very, very brave and you decided to write your article here on WordPress instead of maybe in a Word document first.
So I highly suggest kind of writing your articles if you can over in a Word document or some sort of system like that so you that you can always have a backup version anyway, right, somewhere else on your computer. But if you’re not doing that, this is a great way to find those revisions. Okay.
If by some odd chance (this is going to be a short tutorial for the day). If by some odd chance these little buttons are not to be found anywhere. If you hit that drawer up top—this Screen Options drawer— and you can’t find Revisions in there. Or if this little tab right here is not available to you, you need to call your hosting company because more than likely they might have some sort of an auto setting inside of their hosting program that does not allow that to happen.
Another reason could possibly be a Theme blocking it. So, unfortunately, some authors might decide that that’s going to mess up some of their cool features that they have inside their Theme, so they block that option. I want you to kind of test things.
You can switch Themes really quickly and see if it now appears. So, then, that’s troubleshooting. You would know right away that it’s a Theme issue. Or, you can call your hosting company and ask them, “Hey, do you guys block revisions inside of my WordPress dashboard?” Okay?
I hope that helps y’all. Be sure to subscribe. I’m going to put the link right here in the description box, or, actually, right here below my screen. Click here to subscribe.
Every single Wednesday we’re going to be releasing great videos just like this. WordPress Wednesday.
Have a great day. See y’all later. Bye bye, y’all.
[ Kori Ashton, WebTegrity.com ]
