Show IH: Rewind WP
I spent the past month building a project in qurantine that you can read about here. I launched it on Product Hunt and Hacker News. https://www.producthunt.com/posts/rewind-wp
So while I explain everything in the Product Hunt, I will briefly summarize it here: I had seen a website years ago where you requested a demo of a website and you could then interact with your demo website, mess around, etc. Within 24 hours, the website and all the data would be deleted. You could then either request another demo or install and use the product.
A few months ago, I got into developing WordPress plugins. I figured I could build a plugin to do this. But before I built the plugin, I searched the repository for a similar script that could do what I needed. I also searched Google and Code Canyon. I even sent out a request for it on the WordPress forums across Facebook. No one claimed it existed or shared a link and I only found backup plugins.
These backup plugins can automate the process of backing up your website. But then you have to go and manually reset the website at night or whenever you wanted. If you have some knowlege, you could probably set a cron job.
So the request for the plugin was simple:
- create a snapshot of the website and
- automate the process of rewinding the website using that snapshot.
What is the point of this plugin? Setting up demo websites that might contain plugins or themes and letting visitors mess around, change settings, try new themes, and automate the process of rewinding the website to a time before those settings were changed.
The initial reason I built it was because when I build websites, I would have clients go in there and interact and learn their websites. While WordPress is usually good about not breaking, using this allowed me to let them go in there, mess around, and have nothing they did saved, so I didn't have to track down anything they did or do, as the website would reset itself.
While something like this can easily be done with a PHP script and a cron job, it didn't seem to exist for WordPress at all. So I created it. The result is a website and WordPress plugin called Rewind WP which you can navigate to at https://rewindwp.com.
Feel free to leave feedback if you do give it a test.
