Question

Hi I’m studying a solution to apply in a web project and I would like to have your opinion.
I’m going to give to my users the possibility to edit some parts of many pages.
The data will be save in a database, I’m wondering what is the best option to maintain the previous version.
Do you think I have to save them in a different table of database?
What is the best option even thinking the worst (or best it depends from the point of views) case scenario where many people will contribute?

Thanks for any advice.

Answer 1

Here is the basic concept that WikiMedia (Wikipedia) uses to track user changes. You may be able to apply this to your project.

There is a page table. This has a title, some other meta data about the page, and a revision id. The revision id references a revision table. The revision table has information about the revision, like the user id and comments about the update. It also references a text table. The text table has the actual text of the page (as edited by the user).