WordPress 7.0 Will Have Much Better Visual Revisions
WordPress 7.0 is coming soon and it will be the biggest release in at least 10 years for the WordPress project.
We're really excited about Google Docs-style editing that allows you to make changes to WordPress posts at the same as other people.
With the explosive growth of AI in the last couple of years, WordPress 7.0 also leans heavily into AI. There's a new AI Connectors screen which allows to connect your site to OpenAI, Claude, Google Gemini, and other models.
However, in this post I'm going in a different direction and talk about the improved Revisions feature. When you write in WordPress, your changes are automatically saved as Revisions. But these Revisions are difficult to read. It's not simple to see the details of what changed in your post. WordPress 7.0 introduces visual Revisions which make it much easier to see what has changed with your posts.
We're delighted with these changes. They'll make WordPress better for authors and they'll help improve our PublishPress Revisions plugin. Here's a guide to what's changing in with Revisions in WordPress 7.0.
Table of Contents
Revisions now look much better
Before WordPress 7.0, the old Revisions feature looked like this screenshot below. There were two columns, one showing the previous version of the post and one showing the current post. Changes were marked in red for deleted content and green for new content. However, as you can see below, the posts are in HTML. This made the feature difficult to use. What you saw on this screen didn't match what you saw when editing the post.
The new Revisions feature looks like this screenshot below. Now what you see on the Revisions screen matches what you see when editing a post. Instead of the old 2-column view, there's now a stylish 1-column view.
You'll notice now that the changes are still color-coded but they are now more sophisticated. There are three types of changes:
- Yellow: content changed
- Red: content deleted.
- Green: content
Those color-coded changes are shown in the main content area. You can also use the sidebar to navigate quickly between each change, as in this next screenshot.
If you do miss the old-fashioned display, you can always click the “Open classic revisions screen” link.
Changes to block settings are now saved
One other important change is that Revisions will now track changes to your block settings. In this next screenshot you can see the “Changed attributes” area in the right sidebar. This shows that both the background color and the font size have changed.
This next screenshot shows a more complex example A lot of changes were made to an Image block.
More improvements are coming
The changes I've outlined are just the starting point. More good things are planned for the Revisions feature.
Nik Tsekouras on the WordPress team shared plans for a new sidebar view. This would allow you to see visual timeline of the changes to post. If you look at this image closely, you'll notice that it's taken from inside the Site Editor. The WordPress developers are planning to add Revisions support to templates, template parts and patterns.
Aki Hamano shared this image that would build on that timeline improvement. The timeline would also be available when you're looking at a revision.
The Best Plugin to Approve and Schedule Changes to Your WordPress Posts
PublishPress Revisions is the ultimate tool for making content changes in WordPress. This plugin offers a safe space for users to work on content updates.
