Versioned Approvals for Safe WordPress Publishing AutomationVersioned Approvals for Safe WordPress Publishing Automation
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What Exactly Did You Approve?
An approval button needs to identify the version being approved.
Imagine reviewing a proposed update to a service page. The wording is correct, so you approve it. Before publication, someone changes the price in the original page. Should the earlier approval still allow the automation to overwrite that page?
That is the moment a simple “approved” flag stops being enough.
For WordPress Publishing for RailCall, I tied the review to a particular post, proposed changes and action. If the post changes after the preview, the plugin refuses the stale request and requires another review. Updating a draft is separate from publishing a change to live content.
I released the project independently as a WordPress plugin with a companion Python module. The workflow includes previews, publication or scheduling, an activity history and checks of the resulting page.
The useful acceptance test is small:
• Prepare a preview and approve it. • Change the source post before applying the approved operation. • Confirm that the old approval cannot silently replace the newer content.
Also test a retry after a completed operation. A retry must not be treated as approval for a different change.
This matters for ordinary automation as much as AI-assisted editing. A person can make a careful decision and still get an unexpected result if the system applies that decision to different content.
Keep the review focused: which page, what changes, what action and what happens if the source has moved on. Then record the result so someone can understand it later.
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Milan's avatar
Really like this. Saving a content hash of the post at preview time and comparing it at publish makes the stale check cheap and exact, and the activity history then shows precisely which version was approved.
Niko's avatar
Yes, and keeping the reviewed changes alongside the hash makes the history more useful. Someone can see what they approved without having to reconstruct the comparison afterward.
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