Versioning Blog Posts in WSS v3 and MOSS 2007

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Complementing the Work Items list that I described in a previous post, we use a blog site (creatively called the "DevBlog") in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 to track the work items that each member of the Development team has committed to driving to resolved status each day. For a while, I was the "keeper" of the DevBlog -- meaning every morning I would gather the targeted work items for each developer and subsequently add a blog post listing each developer and his or her committed work items. Fortunately, we've since moved towards a more autonomous model where each developer is responsible for adding his or her own work items to the daily blog post.

However, the problem that has been nagging at me is that versioning of the blogs posts was not working. In other words, if I initially create the blog post for today (listing the work items that I am committing to resolving) but then another developer edits the blog post to add his work item commitments, then when I viewed the version history of the blog post, I noticed that there is only one version (1.0) even though I had previously changed the list settings for Posts to create a new version each time an item in the list is edited.

In other words, blog post versioning does not work as expected when the Posts list has the following settings:

  • Require content approval for submitted items? - Yes
  • Create a version each time you edit an item in this list? - Yes

Ouch.

Mind you, it's not that I don't trust the other developers, I'd just feel a whole lot better if we could see exactly which changes were made to the work item commitments blog post by various team members.

After digging into the problem a little, I discovered that versioning works as expected if you disable content approval for submitted items.

By default, when you create a new site based on the Blog template, the Posts list has the following settings:

  • Require content approval for submitted items? - Yes
  • Create a version each time you edit an item in this list? - No

It appears that for blog posts, these two settings should be treated as "mutually exclusive." 

If you subsequently change the list settings to the following, then you'll find that versioning actually works as expected:

  • Require content approval for submitted items? - No
  • Create a version each time you edit an item in this list? - Yes

Hopefully this helps others avoid this baffling situation.

Note that the Blog template is also available in Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) v3.