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1.0-rc3 Release Notes

RC3 is the last major preparation for the final 1.0 release – it is feature complete, reasonably well-tested and stable. The changes are rather small and technical.

Released on 09-Apr-2015; read the announcement blog post.

Note: this is a preview release

Release Candidate means that it contains almost all the planned features for the release and that the stability is quite good. However, not all items on our task list are checked yet so still still qualifies as a preview release.

Release details

Highlights of this release are:

  • Bulk actions are now fully supported. Most of them worked fine in the previous releases but actions around plugins (bulk installation / update / deletion) and themes (bulk installation / deletion) received fixes / updates.
  • Custom posts types and fields confirmed to work correctly. We tested them both manually and through ACF, the popular plugin for custom types/fields management.
  • Finished test suite for v1. We now have all types of tests implemented (unit, functional, Selenium-based, WP-CLI-based, around commits, around database changes etc.) and they also cover a significant part of the v1 functionality. We also tested VersionPress on a wider range of operating systems – Windows and MacOS natively, Linux via Vagrant.
  • Performance improvements around reverts and meta entities. Reverts are generally expensive operations (and will always be) but are much, much faster now.
  • Properly versioned auto-saved drafts. VersionPress' behavior around drafts was not entirely in-line with how WordPress works; it is now. There were also some other minor changes to the automatic change tracking but mostly cosmetic (better change messages, for example).
  • Pre-revert checks even if JavaScript popup is skipped. This is the only user-visible change of the release and basically just displays the pre-revert popup content on its own page if it was skipped for some reason (e.g., disabled JavaScript).
  • WP-CLI actions support. We mainly test VersionPress against actions in the admin area and on the public web but WP-CLI is another important "client" to support (and we are heavy users of WP-CLI). This version fixed a couple of cases where WP-CLI commands created slightly different commits than the web UI.
  • WP-CLI commands for undo and rollback. There are now wp vp undo and wp vp rollback commands implemented. We use them internally and they are technically part of the codebase now but we don't have them properly documented yet so it's more of an initial support only.
  • "Foreign keys" support inside meta entities. WordPress <-> VersionPress ID conversion is now performed also for IDs that "hide" inside meta entities. For example, featured images for posts do that, but it is relatively rare (fortunately).
  • "Git not detected" is a common issue on web servers even if it is installed. We now added some more guidelines on how to resolve this on the initialization screen.
  • Some more security hardening by default. For instance, direct requests into the Git repository are now properly rejected on Windows.
  • Git version requirement stays on 1.9, see below.

Usage notes

System requirements for this release are:

  • PHP 5.3 or later
  • WordPress 3.9 or later (latest release recommended)
  • Git 1.9 or later
    • Note: it is still quite common to encounter Git 1.7 and 1.8 and we investigated during RC3 timeframe whether we could just relax this requirement. However, the answer is no: VersionPress has reproducible issues with Git 1.7 and 1.8 and it is not our priority at the moment to try to work around that. We might return to this in some later version.

Upgrade from previous versions

It's best to start fresh but the basic functionality is upgradable from 1.0-rc2 by replacing the wp-content/plugins/versionpress folder (make sure all the VersionPress sites are secured from direct access with fresh installation ensures).

Upgrades from older pre-release versions (1.0-rc1 and older) will not work.

Known issues

None. Until someone finds some.