In January, we were pretty confident VersionPress 3.0 would be released by the end of that month. In February, we were pretty confident… you get the idea. It's the end of April and I'm really happy to announce that VersionPress 3.0 is finally ready! It's a major technical release and we've done some crazy stuff to support every possible quirk and nuance of WordPress (until we find some new ones, of course!). How often do you write your own Git merge driver?

Also, VersionPress 3.0 is the first version available as a fully open-sourced release on GitHub. We've transitioned to this new model earlier this month and are very happy with it. For instance, we could get rid of PayPal 🙂

To get VersionPress 3.0, head over to GitHub releases, download versionpress-3.0.zip and enjoy!

What's new

The main theme of this release is to make everything really solid when it comes to the default WordPress installation, and to make the user interface more useful. We're still keeping VersionPress in the “early access” period because of the 3rd party plugins integration story but on simpler sites, VersionPress already shines.

Some of the visible new features are:

VersionPress now tracks the environment where commits were created. For example, if you have production and staging environments, it may look something like this:

There can be as many environments as you like, and the naming is also completely up to you.

(As a reminder, VersionPress is excellent at merging databases between environments.)

Another new feature is powerful search (some call it filtering). You can search by author, date, commit message, WordPress action, etc., see the documentation.

Those checkboxes you see on the screenshots allow you to undo more changes at once. For example, the way WordPress creates a new post is that it creates a draft for it first and then changes its state to 'published'. If you want to get rid of a post entirely, you would undo both changes like this:

Then there were loads of improvements to the core versioning engine so for instance shortcodes are now handled better, serialized data cause fewer conflicts, date modified works more reliably, spam comments no longer flood the history, etc. All these are not flashy features but make VersionPress so much better in real-world scenarios. The team (@JanVoracek, @octopuss, @VasekOstrozlik, @stibi and @pavelevap) have really done an outstanding job.

You can see all the changes in the full release notes.

What's next

In our updated roadmap, one item stands out: support for complex 3rd party plugins. That will be the primary focus of VersionPress 4.0 scheduler roughly for this summer (but you should know by now that we are terrible at estimates) and we will also continue improving the overall experience using VersionPress. Our goal remains the same: to take all the incredibly powerful functionality of Git and package it so that every WordPress user can use it. We've still got a long way to go but VersionPress is shaping up nicely. (Join us if you'd like to help!)

Cheers!