WP Engine disabled revisions and Matt Mullenweg is furious about it, for all the wrong reasons. He wrote an article called WP Engine is not WordPress where he argues that revisions are essential to Wordpress. “WordPress is architected and designed to never lose anything”, he writes.

If only half of that was true, most people would not be in the mess they are currently in. Wordpress stores its content in the same place where it runs the scripts that operate your website. If those scripts get hacked (which happens frequently) you can have all the revisions you want, but you will (most likely) not be able to recover anything… unless you have a backup. The interesting thing about backups is that they are also usable as a revision mechanism. Surely, not the MOST friendly one, but if you want to undo your changes, you can just look in your backups and restore them. WP Engine has a lot of options when it comes to restoring backups. So, what is Matt really complaining about?

He runs a commercial service called Wordpress.com and WP Engine and Wordpress.com both fight over the same market share. WP Engine actually did a smart thing by disabling revisions (assuming everybody has a proper backup strategy). This trick saves them a TON of money, increasing their profits, as Matt argues. Apparently, Matt feels threatened by this and tries to shame WP Engine on the community website wordpress.org. He calles WP Engine a cancer. That is a bridge to far, if you ask me. Surely, they are being cheap, but that is all in the game. Using your community platform to attack a competitor is a no-go.

If Wordpress was really architected and designed to never lose anything, as Matt argues, it would use Git for content. Git sends every change to another server, where it is stored securely. Git providers, like Github, give you a nice visual interface to manage those revisions. You will never lose anything, not even when your complete Wordpress installation gets hacked and wiped.

The fun thing is that it is not even hard to achieve either. I am tempted to write a Wordpress hook that commits every save as a revision to a Git repository, as I already have all the PHP classes. Remember I built a CMS for Hugo that uses PHP and Git? A small config file could store the public resources (themes and plugins) that are being used, so they can be re-downloaded when needed.

Matt, why don’t you use Git for content and make Wordpress both safer and cheaper to run for everybody? Remove revision. If you can’t beat them, join them. And when you are down that path, you are just a small step away from converting your complete website to a static site generator: an architecture that is not only greener, but also superior to a Wordpress website in almost any way. But hey… that is just my opinion. Feel free to let that one slide.

Matt, why don’t you use Git for content and make Wordpress both safer and cheaper to run for everybody?

I think that Matt should put his money where his mouth is and stop fighting over this broken revisions concept. Currently it is just a poor man’s version control and WP Engine made a smart move by removing it. If people really hate that, all 1.5 million WP Engine users will soon move to Wordpress.com, but nobody, not even Matt, believes that. The fact is that WP Engine out-smarted him strategically. Now it is his turn to React (pun intended). A perfect opportunity to solve the real problem: content safety, by implementing Git for content in Wordpress. Note that that would also rob WP Engine from its advantage over Wordpress.com, levelling the playing field. A win-win situation.

What do you think?

()  Joost van der Schee