Skipped unnecessary serialization of previous value in webhooks

[EvanHahn]

no ref

This performance improvement should have no user impact.

Webhook payloads have a previous value, which is the old state of the model. This only includes keys that have changed.

Before this change, we'd compute it and then, sometimes, discard everything.

After this change, we only compute it if there's anything to compute.

[coderabbitai]

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Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 9bcfdd2 and adaa034.

📒 Files selected for processing (1)

• ghost/core/core/server/services/webhooks/serialize.js

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Walkthrough

The webhook serializer in serialize.js now computes a changed field list early from model._changed. The previous snapshot is generated only when changed is non-empty and model._previousAttributes exists. The serialized previous document state is filtered to only changed properties at the point of assignment, and the resulting webhook payload directly embeds this pre-filtered previous snapshot instead of filtering the full previous state during payload construction.

Possibly related PRs

• TryGhost/Ghost#29162: Modifies the same serialize.js file to compute changed from model._changed and filter the previous webhook payload to changed fields.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 4

✅ Passed checks (4 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Title check	✅ Passed	The title accurately summarizes the main webhook serialization optimization.
Description check	✅ Passed	The description aligns with the changeset and explains the same webhook previous-value optimization.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.

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☁️ Nx Cloud last updated this comment at 2026-07-09 16:06:13 UTC

[EvanHahn]

Minor: I only changed this line for consistency.