The Learn WordPress site has a lot of content (especially in lesson plans) that is specific to a particular version of WordPress. When a new version of WordPress is released, that content has to be reviewed and updated, which requires a lot of effort from members of the Training Team. Right now, these updates can only be made after the new version is released, because updates to post content happen immediately (only unpublished posts can be scheduled to publish on a future date). The Docs team that maintains HelpHub and DevHub faces similar challenges.
The Meta team is attempting to improve this situation by making it possible for contributors to save a change to an already-published post that will go live at a later date. This will be a plugin installed on the WordPress.org network that can be enabled on any network site.
The basic scope of the plugin:
- From the block editor, make changes to an already-published post and schedule those changes to go live at a later date.
- In the block editor UI as well as other admin screens, indicate when a post has a scheduled update.
- View a list of all scheduled updates.
- Edit scheduled updates, including the content and the future publish date.
- Compare scheduled update content to the current published content.
- This functionality should be available for all post types that support revisions.
Under the hood, the plugin will use Core’s built-in revision system. A scheduled update will be saved as a revision post type with a future post status. When the update is due to be “published”, it gets converted to a normal post revision with an inherit post status and then that revision is “restored”.
Here’s a (very rough) screencast of the basic workflow:
The code for the plugin is currently in this GitHub repo.
FAQ
Aren’t there plugins out there already that do this?
There are a couple, but they are either inadequate for our needs or they add a bunch of extra stuff that we don’t need.
What about suggested updates, that don’t necessarily have a future publish date, but should be reviewed by a content editor before being approved and incorporated into an already-published post?
This is another feature that is often requested. While the same underlying revision system could be used for suggested updates as well, the UI flows are more complicated, so the current focus is just on scheduled updates.
Also, there is a fundamental limitation of how revisions are created and stored, in that each revision contains the entire content of a post. So if two people suggest revisions for a particular post at the same time, whichever suggestion gets approved first would be overwritten by the second suggestion. This would probably be a good topic for a separate post.
Is this something that belongs in WordPress Core?
If Core leadership thinks that this feature would benefit 80% of WordPress users, then sure! The plugin will definitely be built to work gracefully with Core and the block editor. If this were prioritized for merge, Core’s revisions system would need to be updated to be a bit more flexible, and the block editor UI would need some changes to become more customizable.
Got other questions? Please share them in the comments!