Rewind WP: Presentation, Staging, Testing. Automatically.

A few years ago, I had seen a website and came to use my second CMS, just after PHP Fusion ( https://www.php-fusion.co.uk/hom... ). At the time, it was called ocPortal, now known as Composr (https://compo.sr/), which would then lead me to the ultimate CMS, WordPress. Never wanting to forget my roots and where I learned, I had pondered the magic of PHP Fusion and ocPortal. With PHP Fusion came lots of PHP errors. I had no idea what the PHP tags meant or how to write code, and so there were a lot of errors. I would have to download and re-install everything. I must have spent countless hours learning how to install plugins into PHP Fusion, before something would crash it, some incompatible code, and then I'd have to try again. With ocPortal came something new: an entirely different type of CMS that offered built-in entertainment and fun. Composr is still serious business today and seems to operate the same way as it did over a decade ago. What I remember most about ocPortal was they offered a demo: and within that demo, you could play with their CMS, and every 10 minutes or every hour, no matter what you were doing, the entire demo was reset. You had to start all over again, but it gave you the time and experience to learn the platform, and made cleanup easy. Once you went back into the demo, nothing was remembered. The entire database and all of your files were completely wiped out and you had a fresh start at playing witth the demo again, making it perfect for setting up a series of demo websites and letting potential visitors or customers tweak and tinker with the system. If Composr and PHP Fusion could be merged together where my mistakes were always reset. While I learned greatly from making mistakes, the fact was that some were so serious that it required me to install wipe out the entire server and install everything all over again. If I had a tool like the demo from Composr, then I could make mistakes without worrying about anything serious happening on my server. I decided to check the WordPress plugins repository for a solution. There were plenty of tools that could backup your website. You could click the restore button if you made a mistake too. However, there was nothing that would allow me to let visitors interact with websites or let my clients interact with their websites, where they could go in there and learn the platform without saving changes. More specifically: it had to be automatic. I decided to poll a few Facebook groups with thousands of members in those groups and even made a good friend in the process of my search: I wanted to know where I could find a tool that allowed me to setup a demo website where I could show it off, let visitors interact with it , and then forget any changes they made. And I needed this process automated. Zero response on posts I made. Thus, I decided I would build it. And so, I spent months trying to figure out how to build such a tool or even see any use in it. Maybe it was pointless. Maybe it was useless. Who knows. But I really liked the fact that I could go mess around with different plugins or themes, view them, change settings, and give myself 10 or 20 minutes to look around, get a feel for it, and then have it change back to the default. Similar to an apartment! How awesome would it be to go look at apartments, paint the walls, sleep in the bed, eat the food in the refrigerator, use the bathroom like its your own, and make yourself completely at home. In 24 hours, everyting is reset back to its default, and it was like you never even stayed there, while getting the experience. Okay, so I can't do that physically to an apartment, but it sounds like a futuristic Fifth Element scene. But I can do that for websites. And that's the story of Rewind WP. This was my first quarantine project during COVID-19. Check it out! https://rewindwp.com Please note: the website and wordpress plugin work together and do require each other to work.