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Question:  I was editing an article in Joomla.  The original developer had included a custom flash presentation in the article content that we paid over $1,000.00 for. It looked nice. Unfortunately,  she no longer is available to assist us. I made a change to the page content, clicked SAVE and checked the front end.  The copy was there, but the flash was gone. How can I undo what was done? Help.

Answer:
This type of thing does happen when you use the WYSIWYG editor and don't know HTML.  If you are going to work in the web world, we highly advise learning at least basic html. Even so, mistakes happen. So, let's get to the answer.

First, there is no way easy way to "rollback" a single content item once it has been edited and saved.  That is just a fact of life with Joomla and other CMS systems. Heck, that's a fact of life with most digital media. Once the original source file is saved and closed, forget about "rolling back".

However, in this case you could ask your host provider to execute a whole site rollback to the last date the site was backed up.  Of course, that may not be advisable if your last site back up was more than one "article" ago.  If the site was last backed up a couple days ago and few hundred more items have gone online since then, you will lose that data.  So, you have to weigh your options.  Of course, you could set up a beta site, populate with the rollback data, find the specific item in question and copy and past the source code. Ugh, that's a lot of work for a single item bit of flash code.

Before you go to all the trouble above, let's try this quick trick.

Presumably, your site is indexed by the search engines.  If so, go to Google and type in cache:http://www.mydomain/messedupurl.html

If you are lucky, Google will have a cache of the page that is only a day or so old.  This cache should have the OLD content with the flash code.  Look at the source code and grab the content you need.  Open up the article in question, view using the HTML button, paste over NEW content, apply, and walla, you got yourself out of a $1,000.00 mistake.