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Page Versioning v2

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Hello again, Eray Chou here. We’re hitting the tail end of this year’s conference season, and a question I’ve been asked a few times on the road is whether there are solutions or best practices for rolling back changes to page edits in WSS.

One best practice is to put pages into document libraries and turn on versioning. There are limitations to this solution, which I’ll get into shortly, but it is a quick and easy way to handle changes to page content.

To create a document library in SharePoint Designer:

1.) File > New > SharePoint Content

2.) Click on Document Libraries in the left pane and then select Document Library

3.) Name your Document Library, for example “Pages”, and then click “OK”

Next, turn on Versioning for that document library:

1.) Select the Document Library you just created in the Folder List.
Type Alt+F1 if the folder list is not showing, or click Task Panes > Folder List

2.) Right click on the Document Library and select Properties

3.) Go to the Settings tab

4.) Set the Use Version History option to either “Major and minor (draft) versions” or “Major Versions”. If you opt for the former, set the Make drafts visible to option based on your own preference

Now that your document library with versioning is set up, you can create and save new pages into this document library. Each subsequent save you make will create a new version, and if you make changes that you want to revert, you can roll back to a previous version of the page.

To roll back changes:

1.) Click on the Page you want to roll back in the folder list

2.) Right click on the page and select Version History

3.) Pick the version number to restore, and then click Restore
Note that restoring a version just copies the old content into a new version, so you can always restore your most recent page edits. For example, if I’m currently on Ver 3.1 and decide to restore Ver 2.0, I’ll get a Ver 3.2 with the 2.0 page content.

The Master Pages gallery for your site has this turned on by default. So you can take advantage of rolling back versions on master page edits without additional setup.

As noted earlier, there are a few limitations with this approach:

· This approach does not work for web parts in web part zones. When a web parts is in a Web Part Zone, it gets stored in a different table internally and doesn’t support versioning. This approach does work for web parts that are not in zones.

· We do NOT recommend drag-dropping default.aspx into this document library. The homepage of the site is controlled by a meta-info key, and it takes code to update.

· There is no need to use this approach on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Publishing sites. Sites using the Publishing template already have a pages library and have this sort of roll-back functionality on by default.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 07, 2008
    PingBack from http://www.tmao.info/page-versioning-v2/

  • Anonymous
    November 07, 2008
    Its interesting to note that webpart in different zones are internally stored differently. Can you explain in brief, why this distinction is and what enforces this distinction?

  • Anonymous
    November 10, 2008
    Top News Stories ECM Provider Clearview Gets Cozier with SharePoint (CMSWire) Being that Clearview Enterprise

  • Anonymous
    November 10, 2008
    Are there plans to support this versioning and rollback functionality for web parts in web part zones?  To give a little background, we are a Microsoft ISV Partner and one of our products is a gallery of web parts.  We recommend our users place these web parts in web part zones so they can modify/interact with them.

  • Anonymous
    December 08, 2008
    Love to see more work showing mashup creation. Just posted a video with a SharePoint rockstar showing use of Designer to create a SharePoint Zune Serives mashup using Data View that is pretty cool. You should get hom to do a write-up like this as a guest blogger http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/mikeg/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=1414

  • Anonymous
    January 26, 2009
    Thanks for the information.  Is there anyway to enable versioning control for web parts in web part zones?  It just seems strange that there is no way to revert back on pages with webparts, particularly since the option to do is listed on these pages.  Any ideas here would be great. Thanks!

  • Anonymous
    November 01, 2009
    We have the same issue with version history doesn't work with web parts in web part zones. We have a lot of pages with web parts in web part zones. This makes us a lot of frustration. we cannot restore these pages. Any solutions and suggestions about restore pags like thi?

  • Anonymous
    November 01, 2009
    I have the same request as Zoe. How can we do page level restore for web part in web part zone pages? This is a very common task, sharepoint just cannot do it, I cannot believe it.

  • Anonymous
    January 21, 2010
    A few questions: Is it possible to use letters instead of numbers for versioning or a combination. For example, instead of 1.0 use A.0 instead of 2.4 B.4? The reason is that in my company we use revisions numbers in documentos A, B, C instead of 00.00, i would like that the version number in sharepoint would be the same as in the document word (version written inside the document). Thanks a lot and best regards,