Thread

Ok, so I’ve never used Versioning before and I was wondering if anyone else had?  Was it a good experience?  Did it affect the page load at all?  I’m wondering because I’d potentially like to store a whole bunch of revisions (~100) and I’m afraid it will affect the MySQL queries speed.  Or, is the only time the revisions are displayed/queried is in the CP when you’re editing an entry?

Thanks guys!
Mark.

I use versioning for both templates and articles.

It doesn’t have an effect on the performance. it’s just storing additional copies. But even so, i’ve been doing versioning since I launched my site (right after the 04 election) and I currently have4 over 2100 articles. Even with that, and I set a really high limit for versioning (over 100) my whole database is only 95 megabytes. Text is really easy to manag and it’s pretty rare that an article is revised. Unless they’re trying to find a change they made. but I would guess there’s less than 40 total revisions on articles total.

If I was going to be thrifty with it, I wouldn’t version my articles. just my templates.

Excellent!  That’s exactly what I was hoping to here.  Anyone else have any success/warnings?

I don’t turn any versioning on until we’re close to completing the project, but after that I do as a safety net for clients.  I usually just use the default limit. I’ve experienced a performance hit from a lot of things, but never anything I could pin down to versioning.

I don’t know if it adds to the query time when rendering a page on the frontend. Would be interesting to know, tho.

The primary consideration with template and entry versioning is the increase in your database size.  Every entry and template will occupy X amount of space, where X is the revision limit.  So if you have 1024 entries with an average of 1kb per entry, and are saving 100 revisions, then instead of one megabyte of database storage, you are consuming potentially up to 100MB of database storage.

Thanks everyone, I guess I was just afraid that saving revisions would then cause the exp:weblog:entries tag to take a little extra time to query the revisions, but if that’s not the case that’s great!

Nope, the front end is not impacted, Mark, as revisions are saved as serialized data in the exp_entry_versioning table, and fetching from there only comes into play when viewing a previous revision in the Publish page, and to compile the dropdown list on the same.

Huh, thanks Derek.  I think the only thing I’m still looking for with this is the ability to display revision information on the front end?  Is that possible with an EE tag, or would it take a plugin?  I couldn’t find anything in the docs relating to it.

That would require a plugin/module/PHP, as the entry’s revision data is serialized, similarly to related entries.

Thanks Derek, sounds like fun!

Check out cp.publish.php around line 417 for the query, unserialization, etc., and dump the array to your browser so you can see what you have access to.  It’s basically just the entire POST array that would be sent with the Publish form.