Revision Retention Policy – WordPress Websites

Revision Retention Policy

This document describes the revision retention policy for the Faculty WordPress Site pilot project. It applies to all WordPress sites on the sites.lsa.umich.edu server.

Purpose

Review Condition

Discussion

Policy

Exceptions

Approval

Purpose

This policy exists to clarify the standards for how many revisions we keep for faculty, lab, and minor program web sites in the WordPress project.

Review Condition

If the policy has gone at least a year without review, a review of this policy may be necessary.

Discussion

WordPress stores a very granular revision history for every page on every site in its database. As the number of sites and pages grow, so does the database; as the database grows, performance degrades. If we only retain a relatively small number of revisions then the database won’t grow as big as fast and we won’t see performance degrade as badly.

In WordPress’ context, a revision is the status of a edit page when someone clicks Save, regardless of whether they publish it.

Policy

As part of ongoing regular maintenance we will only keep the most recent seven (7) revisions for any and every page.

Exceptions

The support team is allowed but not required to grant exceptions to this policy.

Approval

This policy was approved on 2014-04-28 by Pat Belden, Director of Web Services.

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