VersionPress 1.0 Released (opens in new tab)

> There is one important thing to understand about VersionPress: though it is technically a WordPress plugin, it is one of the most complex ones you can imagine.

This send shivers down my spine.

Looking over this and revisr and gitium, and being already familiar with Drupal's "Features" and new CMI, I feel there is a general pattern here.

The pattern is that we build a tool that allows non-programmers to build more and more complex things, until they are actually programming, and then we find ourselves in a mess because we have "code" with all the complexity of such without the tools and practices to manage it.

I think I saw this decades ago as the community of Unix users I was with developed more and more complex dotfiles, and traded them around, they were modified more and more by non-programmers, until the day someone put them in CVS and shared them.

This definitely happened in the Visual Basic story arc.

I suspect this also happened in COBOL, which started out as a way to let non-programmers program, then became a programming language that non-programmers could at least read and understand, and then became a black art.

I believe this happened with PHP, as it started with a way for non-programming "html coders" to reference the same $footer across all pages, and as that group of programmers moved through their careers and became real programmers, the tools and PHP itself evolved with them.

I think this is happening with Javascript now, as a class of "front end developers" who mostly started out as non-programmer, non-technical graphic designers discovered the power of being able to tell computers what to do, and now are doing things like node.js.

In the CMS world, I think WordPress is a bit behind on this arc compared to Drupal. That's not a criticism, it's just an observation of where a much larger community with a different balance of site builder vs user vs developer is -- WordPress is much further along on arc of widespread adoption, though.

Text cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

been using revisr, a free plugin that not only does the same thing and more but it has been out for almost a year now with regular upgrades and feature adds:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/revisr/

will take a look at this to see how it compares

The staging aspect of this is what I'm really looking forward to. Once this works I'm hooked. I'd also gladly pay for a plugin this complex and all the benefits it provides.

I really love the idea behind this. The team is dedicated too. I have been following it for awhile, hoping they would get here. Great work.

Hmm, if I pay $50 to download it, can I charge them $50 for advance notice of any security vulnerabilities I find in their plugin?

Hmmm, this is kinda nifty. How long does the mysqldump and git commit take? It seems like comments could DOS the server.

Honestly, this is what WordPress revisions should have been. In the age of git, there's no point in re-creating a versioning system that only covers elements of your system and not the entire thing. Just hook into git if it's available or even make a PHP implementation of git and use it.