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1.0-beta1 Release Notes

Our first beta. VersionPress is now supposed to work mostly fine for all the scenarios planned for the 1.0 release. Also, next releases will be upgradable from this.

Released on 28-Nov-2014.

Note: this is a beta release

Beta means approximate feature completeness but bugs might still be there and production use is discouraged. Always have a proper backup solution if you decide to use VersionPress at this stage.

Release details

Highlights of this release are:

  • Main table paging. When the number of commits is greater than a certain number (currently 25) the main table will offer paging.
  • VersionPress service panel above the main table. Currently features assisted issue reporting that will bundle things like logs, basic environment info etc. in a ZIP file automatically and post it to our servers for further inspection.
  • Help messages / detailed information in requirements checker that is run before VersionPress activation.
  • "Multi-commit messages" allow VersionPress to track actions that involve multiple physical changes better. For example, trashing a post usually involves also some postmeta changes, might also influence comments etc.; VersionPress now tracks all that properly as part of one logical change.
  • Related to the previous point are change-info priorities – if there are more changes in one commit, their priorities now influence which message is displayed to the user. For example, VersionPress will rather display "post 'xyz' trashed" than "postmeta 'abc' updated".
  • Committing of related changes only. This is an important technical change that allows VersionPress to work with custom commits made outside of it (e.g., on command line). VersionPress now knows which files should be committed for various detected changes, so for instance if a post was updated changed only the related change will be committed and all else will be ignored. Previously, if you had e.g. your theme files edited, the post change commit would take these changes with it.
  • Improved versioning for a couple of things, for example drafts, postmeta, terms etc.
  • Physical commit messages now use more useful / readable format so for instance working with the repository on the command line is now more pleasant.
  • Future-proofing of the sync functionality (team work, multiple environments etc.). Though the full functionality will only be part of 2.0, we needed to do some ground work in 1.0 so that all works fine for older commits.
  • Changed location of the internal db folder so that it better supports future VersionPress updates. This means that there is no direct upgrade path from 1.0-alpha3.
  • New filesystem library which should bring better VersionPress support in various environments / XAMP stacks.
  • Settled on PHP 5.3 as the minimum required version. This helps development on various levels, e.g., we could use the filesystem library mentioned above which is PHP 5.3+ only, as many current libraries are.
  • Fixed a lot of bugs found in alpha3.
  • Improved the docs site with features like navigation to prev/next topic, updated HTML title of the doc articles etc.

Usage notes

-Note: there is no upgrade path from 1.0-alpha3 as noted above. Please install from scratch.*

System requirements for this release are:

  • PHP 5.3 or later
  • WordPress 3.8 or later
  • Clean installation of WordPress – you can then try to install some simpler 3rd party plugins but this whole area is quite volatile at the moment
  • Git 1.7 or later (earlier versions might work but are not tested)
  • proc_open() enabled
  • No existing wp-content/db.php file

Known issues

  • Some comment changes (pending, approved states etc.) are not yet tracker properly
  • Postmeta sometimes buggy
  • UI not very polished