VersionPress goes open source | Hacker News Reader

VersionPress goes open source

blog.versionpress.net

137 pointsborekb20 comments

Helpful info for me:

VersionPress is a free and open source version control plugin for WordPress built on Git.

We increase major version numbers quite rapidly, e.g., VersionPress is at 3.0 at the time of writing this, but that does not mean it is production-ready.

Maybe 10.0 will be 'production ready'

We try to be very clear about the project status. We would love it to be magically stable soon but unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. Relational databases and (sometimes) crazily coded WordPress plugins do not fit well into the version control workflows, but we're already quite far in terms of the core technology and I'm confident WordPress will be a fully versioned platform one day.

The 'merge databases' feature sounds like either a sweet victory of immutable data that makes life easier all around OR something truly horrible that never should have been born.

If these guys have solved the WP devops problem, they will be millionaires and candidates for canonization.

We're still in the process of solving it but I would be against the rest of the sentence :)

What is your business model now that you're not charging for the software?

Charging for a GPL'd software (all WordPress plugins have to be GPL, at least in practice) is tricky and most companies in the WordPress space focus on services. Which is what we'll do as well. The technology itself, however, will be free and stay free.

Check out the https://roots.io project, not the same thing, but relevant to "modern" Wordpress dev practices.

This is a problem that's bugged me for a long time - it's good to see people working on it. Deploying and managing most traditional CMSes is a nightmare, IMO.

MODX has had something similar for a while with Gitify[1] for the site structure and VersionX[2] for content, but I haven't had much of a chance to use them.

[1] https://github.com/modmore/Gitify [2] https://modx.com/extras/package/versionx

It's bugged me too, almost to the point of me thinking I was crazy. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how people were handling these problems with WordPress. And frankly I'm still baffled. I'd get these looooongggg schpeles about workflows tangential to the actual problem and then finally the admission that you just write down or remember the changes you made on staging, and make them on prod as well.

Exactly. VersionPress tries to automate that :)

I put a client's site in a git repo once, but I never figured out how to safely and effectively git the database too. Kudos to VersionPress! I've only learned about them today but they seem to be doing a really solid job.

Depends how often it changes. In my case I had a db that was a small number of slowly-changing configuration records (a typical web site would probably also be similar) and a large number of log records. I just serialized it once a day and checked everything but the log records into a git repo. The log records were just saved like standard syslog records in two places. Worked fine the one time we needed to restore.

sql's mysqldump CLI command locally or phpmyadmin > export produce a text based db backup in SQL and version that file in git.

If it is a huge site split the tables into separate files but 1 file is pretty good for most medium sized clients.

Git merging db's can be gnarly if changed significantly, (rollbacks are trivial).

This looks very useful and GPL just like Wordpress - excellent!

basically do the same with drupal also.

I manage hundreds on WP sites and this tool is exactly what our company needs. Im looking forward into trying it out and contributing the project.

I've used revisr for this in the past:

https://github.com/ExpandedFronts/revisr

There are some important differences between VP and revisr: https://blog.versionpress.net/2015/01/versionpress-vs-revisr...

Im not sure if versionpress is having load issues. But Im not able to load any docs.versionpress.net links.

Sorry, docs.versionpress.net had HTTPS issues, should be fine now.

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