Introduction
For most of Simple:Press’s life, version control has been done using Subversion (aka svn). Subversion is a great centralized version control system in use by thousands of companies. However, over the last few years, developers have been moving towards a more decentralized and ‘smarter’ version control system known as git. Even Microsoft, with their massive code-base, has moved to git – and they’ve made significant contributions to the open-source git functionality over the last few years in order to make it functional for huge development enterprises.
Without going into all the gory details about the differences between the two systems, we have made the decision to move all future development to git, starting with Simple:Press version 6.0.7. Therefore version 6.0.6 is the last version of Simple:Press (and related premium themes and plugins) that will be released via svn.
Greater Transparency
One of the biggest benefits of this move will be greater transparency in the software development process. While Simple:Press has always been open-source, the configuration of our svn repository made it impossible to be completely open about all the commits and changes being made in real-time.
With our move to Github, every commit (i.e.: every code-change) to the free core Simple:Press plugin will be available for review by the public. And it will be easier for anyone to submit features and bug fixes via git’s PULL REQUEST mechanism.
Pro Tip: Want to receive notification every time there is a code change or other activity in the development cycle? Just click the WATCH button at the top of our main git page (you do need a free account and be logged in to do this though.)
Drawbacks
There is one big draw-back in moving our development to GitHub. We lose our integration with our very powerful issue tracking system, Mantis. Going forward we will be using Github’s issue tracking system in order to keep everything centralized. But we will miss Mantis’s powerful features.
What Does This Mean For You?
Generally, it means nothing for you as an end user. However, if you’re interested in tracking the development of the plugin at all, or contributing to it, its now easier to do so!
Will The Premium Plugins Be Available As Well?
No. Making them public would essentially be giving them away for free. But, we are moving all plugins and themes to git repositories at bitbucket. These will be PRIVATE repositories. Doing so will make it easier to bring in developers and users to a single plugin or theme without exposing all other plugins and themes. This was something we could not do with our existing svn configuration.
Additionally, our FREE plugins and themes are PUBLIC in bitbucket along with their respective issue lists. Here are the links to the public plugins and theme repositories.