A client recently asked why the history/version UI in Umbraco feels so editor-unfriendly. Currently, it just shows JSON properties highlighted in red or green to indicate what was removed or added, similar to how the Translation Manager works. It feels very basic and not in line with the usual "Umbraco experience." Personally, I haven’t worked much with versions, but I was surprised at how unintuitive and unpolished it felt. Are there any plans to make the versioning UI more visual and editor-friendly? For example, a side-by-side comparison (like the language comparison view) would make it much easier to see changes clearly. Or maybe there are packages that I haven't found?

Yes, crying out for a package to make it better. The reason this hasn't been done (yet) is because it's tricky. One challenge is that property types, as well as their values, may change between content versions. The other is that some values are straightforward to compare against - others are big blobs of JSON (blocklist/grid) that may have a wildly different schema between content versions. The current UI is not nice, but it does at least surface all the differences. The big difficulty in replacing it is that you need a UI that can handle every possible value, side-by-side, in a user friendly way, while also making it clear exactly what's changed between the versions.

I understand that there's complexity, and I’m sure there are even more details that make this a tricky problem if we dig deep. But then again, I don’t think that should be an excuse to leave it as-is. Umbraco has been clear recently that editors and their experience have been somewhat sidelined in favor of other priorities, but that there’s a shift in focus coming. Improving the version history UI would be a huge step in that direction. While it’s true the current UI surfaces differences, it’s still not very useful for most editors—who are the primary audience for this feature in the first place. ⭐

I think that Umbraco Workflow has way more advances options for displaying the differences between two versions. Since Workflow is designed to be an auditing tool where someone needs to check if changes made by someone else are acceptable, it really needs to have a better comparison, so it does. So the knowhow (and code?) is available in house. The question is if it keeps being reserved for a paid plugin or not.

https://marketplace.umbraco.com/package/umbraco.community.rollbackpreviewer For information this was just something I saw the other day 😄