How you use Coda without a proper version history feature?

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Hi Coda community!

I would be really interested in how you guys use Coda in a team and can live with the current version history feature?

These are my concerns with the current version history feature:

  • The user (non-doc maker) is not able to revert their changes in a row/page. In Notion (and nearly every wiki tool out there) you have a button to revert to a previous version of the page/row with a click of button. In Coda the non-doc makers have to call the doc makers and ask them to revert the changes. Doc makers have better things to do and it seems the opposite of the kind of work culture coda wants to offer (automation, asynchronous work etc.) :smile:
  • It’s really hard to see the previous version of a row. With the new changes in Coda 4.0 where only doc makers can create sites, there is an obvious move to force people to use a database instead of multiple pages (which is the right way in my opinion!). For example, you now don’t have a top-level page called “Wiki” with multiple sub-pages, instead the doc-maker creates a database and the pages are rows in a database. If you now want to see a previous version of the row you only see the previous version of the whole database! You have to manually search the whole database for changes which are related to the one row you are looking for!
  • You can only revert the whole doc to a previous state and not only one row. The only way to revert changes is to make a copy of a previous version of the doc. If you want to revert only one row to a previous version, you have to manually copy it, yikes!

Coda is in advance compared to so many tools in nearly any aspect. It seems so well thought in a lot of aspects. It has some quirks (like every tool has), but I can live with all of them.

The only quirk with I can’t live is the version history feature of pages/rows. In conjunction with no possibility to do an easy, regular and automated backup of the data, I have a really bad feeling about the handling of data with coda. I just get anxious thinking about using Coda in a team therefore.

I can’t really see any discussion about it here in the community, what surprises me. Coda seems so well engineered in many aspects, that I’m wondering, how can someone design so many advanced features and than there is this basic functionality missing? This is really not meant to be a rant! It’s more like that I doubt myself and I was asking myself: do I oversee something? Is this not nearly as bad in real life as I’m thinking? How are you guys from the community deal with this in the everyday life with coda?

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Hi @Yannik, and welcome to the Coda Community! :slight_smile:

Firstly, I totally enjoyed your post. In practice, I don’t think relying on Doc History is as traumatic as you expect it’ll be but you have brought up some very valid points! This specific problem is something I’ve been mulling over in my head for a while and your post inspired me to quickly whip up a solution that I think may help you.

In this doc, I’ve built a simple system that tracks changes to topics in your wiki. Whenever a user makes an edit to a “page”, a version of the page is stored and there’s a simple workflow to view previous versions and revert the topic back to a previous state if need be. I’ve left a couple of interactions incomplete to inspire you to work through your own solutions, but the gist of the solution is there for you to make a start with. I’ve also tried to include as much documentation as possible to make it easier to understand.

You’re welcome to copy doc if you feel it’s helpful. Good luck with your build!

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Wow, what an answer! Thanks a lot, I really appreciate the effort you put into it :heart:

I already played around with it and it’s definitely a really nice way to solve the problem. It also shows nicely the features and capabilities of Coda. It would still be better to have something similar out-of-the-box from Coda, since it would take a lot of effort if you would want to do this for every database, but your solution is definitely better than the current version history feature.

Is there a way to color-highlight the changes? I couldn’t think of a solution.

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Hey @Yannik

Glad it was helpful! Like I said, something I’ve been mulling over for a while so it was fun to finally put “pen to paper”. Yeah totally agree, this is not a solution for every project, but for wiki-styled docs that have many users (who you don’t necessarily trust to always perform good edits!), it’s something you can look at.

In the style of Apple’s iconic iPhone 3G ads, if you’re looking for a way to do something fairly unique in Coda “there’s a pack for that”. Check out Eric’s Diff Pack for what you’re looking for:

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