Announcing Revision Strike

I’m proud to announce my latest WordPress plugin: Revision Strike.

Unless post revisions are explicitly limited, WordPress will build up a hefty sum of revisions over time. While it’s great to have revision history for some recent content, the chances that old revisions will be necessary diminish the longer a post has been published. Revision Strike is designed to automatically remove these unneeded revisions on older, published posts.

How does it work?

First, a threshold is set, with a default of 30 days. Once a day, Revision Strike will run and find any post revisions in the database attached to published posts with a post date of at least 30 (or your custom threshold) days ago, and “strike” (tear-down and remove) them from the WordPress database.

The Tools › Revision Strike page.

Out of the box, Revision Strike doesn’t need any set up to get it running; simply activate the plugin and let it run in the background. If your revision striking needs are more urgent, the plugin has both Tools › Revision Strike page and a WP-CLI command.

Heavily tested

One of the things I’m most excited about with this plugin is the test coverage: as it’s a passion project and not a client-funded plugin, I’ve been able to spend as much time as I want focusing on testing every little bit of this plugin: Every commit is built and tested on Travis CI, the project has a 4.0 GPA on Code Climate, and over 90% of the codebase has test coverage.

Test coverage in and of itself doesn’t guarantee perfect code, but it does mean that as the project carries on we have better protection against regressions, unexpected behaviors, or breaking changes. Revision Strike touches your content, so I want you to be as confident as I am in the plugin’s behavior.

Clean up your WordPress database

Revision Strike is available for download on WordPress.org. If you’d like to help contribute to future development of the plugin, please feel free to join the project on GitHub.