We're pleased to announce the availability of VersionPress 1.0 RC3 which is planned to be the last release candidate in the 1.0 release cycle. Also, we're making it available to anyone interested so if you want to try it and provide feedback / report bugs, you'll be more than welcome – please read on. EAP (Early Access Program) members will get an email from us as usual.

Release highlights

This being the last release candidate, there are almost no user-visible changes but a lot was still going on in the code.

First and foremost, we completed our work on an automated test suite. This has been a large area of investment since the beginning and we now finally have a test suite that gives us enough confidence every time we change some of our subsystems. It also allows us to test quickly against new versions of WordPress and Git so it is generally a big win for the project and for the users.

Second area where RC3 saw important updates is performance around reverts. VersionPress generally doesn't add much load on top of plain WordPress but reverts are a different story as they are expensive by nature. Our original implementation played it safe from the implementation perspective but also was quite slow when it came to speed. This changes in RC3 where a strong test suite allowed us to experiment with some riskier but also better performing approaches, which we finally switched to.

And as always, there has been a lot of smaller or bigger bug fixes, optimizations and improvements. You can read about the details in the full release notes.

Open access

RC3 is a great opportunity to test VersionPress before the final 1.0 version ships and we'd like to invite anyone interested to join us. Just drop us an email at rc3@versionpress.net and we'll be in touch with the download link, instructions etc. VersionPress 1.0 is now released!

Of course if you want to get not only this build but also subsequent releases, and support us in the development, you can always join the EAP.

What's next

We don't have any more work planned in the 1.0 time-frame except fixing bugs, ensuring compatibility with the upcoming WordPress 4.2 release, etc. This means that VersionPress 1.0 is really rather close and we've already branched off for the next 2.0 release which will be another important milestone in our journey to WordPress as a fully versioned platform.