How to Edit a WordPress Post

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What has happen to WordPress? When you clicked on a Draft, Scheduled or Published post, WordPress would assume you wanted to View the blog post. In a recent update, WordPress now assumes you want to Edit the blog post. This is frustrating. I simply want to view a post and make changes “on the fly”. Now you have to click Save Draft, Update or Schedule the post regardless if you made a change or not. Refer to below image on how I used to view/edit by clicking on a post:

Edit a Post 1
Viewing my Drafts posts in the Editor

Following is my exchanges with WordPress engineers.

My comment:
“I go to Posts and click to open a draft. The Save Draft is displayed in upper right corner. All I do is view the post, I make no changes. I want to leave the post, I then have to save it. I go back into the post, sometimes it ask to Restore the backup.

But I made no changes. This is frustrating. Same thing happens to a Scheduled post. I always have to update. It didn’t use to work this way. If I made no changes, I just used the back arrow; now I always have to save and sometimes restore from a backup.”

See following image asking me to Restore the backup when I made no changes:

Edit a Post 2
Asking me to restore the backup when I made no changes

WordPress response:
“I just ran a test on your site, and did find that if I open a post, and keep it open for more than 30 seconds, close it and then go back into it, it’s providing the message of restoring a backup, even though no changes were made.

Clicking Update on the unchanged post, before closing it, gets rid of the message and avoids it from appearing at all.

It’s not really a bug or a problem, it’s the result of opening a post for a period of time, even if no changes are made.

You can prevent it by clicking Update before exiting any post or page that you open.”

My response:
“Microsoft products are smart enough to know if you have made a change. When you edit a document, and you don’t’ save it , Microsoft will prompt you if you want to save. WordPress should do the same. If all I am doing is viewing a post, it should not prompt me to save or update.”

WordPress response:
“Thank you for the critical feedback! We are always working to improve our editing experience and feedback like this is helpful. One of our genuine concerns is that users do not lose their content while they are working on their post or page. With that said, we hope to ensure that users are prompted to save even the smallest changes made to their posts so that they don’t lose their work.

My best suggestion here is to view your published posts instead of the posts within the editor. This will give you a better sense of what your readers see as well and will ensure that no unwanted changes are made to the posts or pages. You can click on the three dots to the right of the post or page title and click “View” to see the published version of the post/page.”

Refer to below image on how to Edit or Preview a post:

Edit a Post 3
How you must edit or preview a post

Are you experincing this behavior from your WordPress blog site?

I have done the usual like logging in and out of WordPress; clearing my Chrome cache and cookies at least twice. But I still have problems.

I Would Like to Hear from You

Please feel free to leave a comment. I would love hearing from you. Do you have a computer or smart device tech question? I will do my best to answer your inquiry. Please mention the device, app and version that you are using. To help me out, you can send screenshots of your data related to your question.

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Author: Raymond

I am Raymond Oglesby, an Information Technology (IT) specialist with 30 years in the field. I have taught Microsoft Applications and troubleshot computers in 15 countries and many States. My career was focused on mainframes and desktops from application development to implementation. I have written hundreds of programs for various architectures. I decided to start a blog to share my knowledge and experiences with you. I plan on updating this blog at least twice a week about smart phone apps to Windows. Please feel free to leave a Comment or Tweet. I would love to hear from you. Do you have a computer tech question? I will do my best to answer your inquiry. Please mention the app and version that you are using. To help me out, you can send screenshots of your data related to your question.

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