This is a quite common trap among SharePoint users. You set up a document library for Web Part pages and activate versioning. Later on, you try to restore an older version, and realize that it doesn’t work. Why is that? Well, Web Parts that you dump in the Web Part zones of your page are actually stored in a different table internally, and don’t support versioning.

Surprisingly, it seems that versioning works for Web Parts that are NOT in Web Part zones. This is something I just learnt from Eray Chou on the SharePoint Designer Team blog.

If you are interested in page versioning, I recommend that you check out Eray Chou’s article. As for me, I need to try this Web-Part-outside-a-Web-Part-zone thing…