We're happy to announce the availability of VersionPress 4.0-beta. It brings significant stability improvements over the alpha and a couple of new features.

You can download 4.0-beta from GitHub and read the full release notes there.

User-editable plugin definitions

The prime feature of v4 as a whole is extensible plugin support: when a plugin is described by a couple of files called plugin definitions, VersionPress starts providing change tracking, undo or database merging automatically. The genesis of this since v1 is described in the alpha blog post.

4.0-alpha1 brought support for plugin definitions that ship with plugins. For example, if WooCommerce shipped with a .versionpress folder in it (fake news, fake screenshots), VersionPress would pick it up:

4.0-beta expands the support to a user-editable location in wp-content. If you create a folder WP_CONTENT_DIR/.versionpress/plugins/woocommerce and put definition files like schema.yml or actions.yml there (full specification here), VersionPress will use and actually prefer it over the bundled definitions (if they exist):

Post-beta, we will be creating an online repository for plugin definitions, see #1243. Right now, we're focusing on getting the format right so if you're a plugin author or an enthusiastic user, we encourage you to take a look at the examples of WordPress core or WooCommerce by @pavelevap, and find all the details in Plugin-Support.md. You can try to write some simpler definitions, we'll be happy to help on Gitter if you hit any trouble.

Other notable changes

• WordPress 4.7 (#1164) and 4.8 (#1217) are now fully supported.
• Action priorities are filterable, see #1232.
• Plugin-Support.md continues to receive updates based on feedback.
• We've spent some time modernizing our development workflows. For example, local development environment and automated tests now run on Docker which makes them much easier to set up and more reliable cross-platform, see #1041. We've also adopted GitHub projects to manage the development process.
• Many bugs reported in 4.0-alpha1 were fixed.
• Docs have been merged into the main repo. It used to be versionpress/docs in the past but things are a bit easier in the monorepo approach. If you spot something incorrect in the documentation, just send a pull request to one of the files in the docs folder. #1218

These are all the 4.0-beta issues and pull requests.

Get 4.0-beta

You can download the beta from GitHub. As usual, bear in mind that VersionPress is a Developer Preview but we're excited about 4.0 and would love if you gave it a try.

Cheers!