Joomla! Documentation™

Overview

The Version History screen allows you to manage prior versions of the item being edited. Version history is available for Categories, Articles, Banners and Banner Clients, Contacts, Newsfeeds, Weblinks, and User Notes. Each time you save the item with new changes, a new version is created automatically. You can control how many versions to keep for each item in the Options for the component. You can also choose to keep one or more versions forever. If so marked, these versions will not be deleted automatically, even if you exceed the maximum number of versions you have entered in the options. Please note the following: If you use versioning for your articles, custom fields Adding custom fields are not stored in different versions.

How to Access

Click the Versions button on the toolbar while editing the item.

Description

The Version History screen allows you to:

• Restore from a prior version of the item;
• Preview a prior version of the item;
• Compare any two versions of the item;
• Mark an item for permanent retention;
• Delete one or more versions of the item.

Screenshot

Column Headers

• Checkbox. Check this box to select one or more items. To select all items, check the box in the column heading. Note: Many toolbar actions can work with multiple items.
• Date. The time and date that the version was saved. Clicking on this link opens the Preview of that version in a window. Note that one of the dates will be followed by a star symbol. This indicates that this is the version that is currently saved and being edited.
• Version Note. When you edit an item, you have the option to enter in a Version Note. This can be used to help you remember which version has which information. If you entered a Version Note before saving the item, it will show in this column.
• Keep Forever. This column shows whether you have marked the version as Keep Forever. Normally, each version will be retained according to the settings in the component options screen. The default settings are to keep a maximum of 10 prior versions for an item. In this case, when you save an item that already has 10 saved versions, the oldest version is deleted. If a version is marked as Keep Forever, it will not be counted as one of the saved versions and will not be deleted when the maximum number is reached.

To toggle the Keep Forever on or off, check the version's check box and then click the Keep On/Off button in the toolbar.

• Author. The user who saved this version.
• Character Count. The total characters saved in this version. Note that this includes the database column names as well as the actual characters typed in.

Toolbar

At the top right you will see the toolbar:

The functions are:

• Restore. The current version of the item is marked with a star to the right of the Date. If you wish to restore one of the other saved versions, check the check box for the desired version and click on the Restore button. The current version of the item will be replaced with the selected version, and the edit screen will reload with the restored version loaded in the editor.
• Preview. To preview a version, either click on the Date column of the desired version or check the check box and click on the Preview button. A separate browser window will load showing the selected version of the item, similar to the screenshot below.

When you are done viewing the version, close the browser window.

• Compare. To compare two versions to see what was changed, click the check boxes for each of the versions and click on the Compare button. A new browser window will open, as shown in the screenshot below.
  

The first column is the field name, the second is the older version, the third is the newer version, and the last column highlights the differences between the two versions. Two buttons in the upper right corner provide additional functionality as follows.

• Changed Values / All Values. This button allows you to toggle the display to show all fields or only the fields which have changes between versions.
• Show HTML Code / Show as Text. This button allows you to toggle the display to show the HTML source code for the fields or only show the text.

• Keep On/Off. This button allows you to toggle on or off the Keep Forever feature for a version. Normally, the oldest version of an item will be deleted automatically when the maximum number of versions (set in the Options for the component) has been exceeded. If you set the Keep Forever property for a version, it will never be automatically deleted.
• Delete. This button allows you to manually delete one or more versions. Check the check box for the versions you wish to delete and the click on the Delete button. Note that this does not delete the item being edited. It only deletes the version history for the item.

Related Information

• To set the options for Version History, click on the Options button for the desired component.