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Wiki with automatic versioning

A solution for tracking edits to topics in a Wiki-style Coda doc.

Jono Bouwmeester

Introduction

Based on
a post by Yannik⁠
on the Coda Community.

This is an idea I’ve had bouncing around in my head for a little while, so when I saw your post I thought it’d be fun to mock up a simple prototype. Hope it’s helpful!

⁠

🤔 The Issue

Coda keeps track of all edits made to your docs, and provides the Doc History tool to allow you to see those edits on a timeline, and revert your doc to a previous version if unwanted changes have been made.

Although it’s a great feature and it’s saved my butt many times, the solution isn’t ideal for a Wiki-style Coda doc because:

When restoring a previous version of the doc, a new doc is made of that version. So you’d either need to manually copy-paste old content back into your original doc, or you’d need to tell everyone who uses the wiki to “update your bookmark!” to the new doc’s link.

Versions are saved on a doc-level instead of a page-level. So if you notice a page has been incorrectly edited a week ago, you can’t restore that page’s content without also undoing all other page additions and edits made since then.

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✅ The Solution

This doc provides an alternative method for tracking wiki topic changes by storing versions of each topic in a separate table

DB Versions⁠

and then providing workflows to allow users to create new versions intuitively (by making them feel like they’re just editing the topic), and to revert a topic to a previous version.

Give it a Try!

Click on any of the cards below to view a topic (you can consider these “pages” in your wiki).

You’ll notice the Content of the topic is read-only, preventing manual edits. Instead, the user is directed to use a button to Edit Topic.

This creates a duplicate of the latest version of the topic in

DB Versions⁠

and allows the user to edit that existing content as they see fit.

The new row in

DB Versions⁠

becomes the latest version of the topic and is what’s displayed when the topic’s card is clicked.

Below the topic’s Content you’ll notice information about who made the most recent edits (who created the latest version), and when they did so (a timestamp).

Finally, at the bottom of the window you’ll see a subtable listing Previous Versions of the topic. You can see a list of all edits to the topic, along with a date and the user who performed each edit.

Alongside each version is a button to View Version. Clicking this button allows the user to see that previous version, and from there, there’s a button to Revert to this Version, which reverts the main topic’s content back to that version (by deleting all versions made after this one).

⁠

For insight into how this all works (and my recommendations for “next steps”), check out my notes on the

DB⁠

page.

Wiki Topics

Wiki Topics

Mission Statement

Last Edit

1/18/2024, 2:08 PM

Last Edited By

Q1 2024 Goals

Last Edit

1/18/2024, 2:07 PM

Last Edited By

Approved Software

Last Edit

1/18/2024, 2:08 PM

Last Edited By

⁠

If you’d like to work together on updating your current Wiki doc to this kind of schema, feel free to reach out to me via the Coda Community or over email at

jonobobo@gmail.com⁠

. 😉

⁠

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Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.