How can I keep the content of my pages version controlled?

Question

We have a WordPress-based website that provides documentation to our REST API. Since our API is constantly changing, so is the documentation. However, we would like to keep the documentation version controlled so it can be matched against API commits. Is there a way to have WordPress pages get their content from a remote repository (GitHub, for example)? Or is there a way to push content to WordPress from some repository?

Answer 1

You already got something like this built in: Revisions.

// Define the nr of saved revisions in your wp-config.php
define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 30 );

You can simply grab them by calling get_posts() with a post_type of revision.

To show the difference between two revisions simply use wp_text_diff().

// Example
$revisions = get_posts( array(
    'post_type' => 'revision'
) );
echo wp_text_diff(
     $revisions[0]['post_content']
    ,$revisions[1]['post_content']
    ,array(
         'title'       => 'Revision diff'
        ,'title_left'  => $revisions[0]['post_title']
        ,'title_right' => $revisions[1]['post_title']
     )
);

Answer 2

You could use a Git hook and post per XML-RPC to WordPress. A Git hook can be any executable file, even PHP.

Another option – on GitHub – is to use the email hook: Go to https://github.com/username/projectname/admin/hooks, select Email and send an email to the blog. Enable the Post per email feature.