Version Control for theme dev

  • Hopefully this is the proper place to put this post.

    I am a theme developer for a small agency. I’ve been the only developer here for some time and that is about to change. I am interested in using version control to track updates but have zero experience.

    What do you use for version control? Git, Subversion, something else?

    I would like something local b/c I dont want to have to pay for private repositories (github) until I know what I am doing, so I would like to to save everything locally while I get used to the workflow.

    Thanks for any info you can provide. Thanks

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Andrew Nevins

    (@anevins)

    WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support

    I think the standard for WordPress is SVN.
    Personally I get around the problem of publicly available code with GITHub by pushing to Dropbox.

    Thread Starter crawpdx

    (@crawpdx)

    Thanks Andrew- that gives me another avenue to explore.

    I’d recommend you give GIT a go. Its really become the new standard for software development. DVCS systems offer far better support for forking and branching code… Which is what the internet has now rendered commonplace.

    Its arguably a bit more complicated than SVN. It’s a different work flow.

    If you are on Mac; Source tree provides a great GUI.
    If you are windows Tortoise is ok.

    You should look at Bitbucket for hosting your repository. Up to 5 users is free. Caters for GIT and others also.

    I used to use Subversion for my code, but switched to Mercurial and host my repos on Bitbucket. I’ve tried Git, and Mercurial just seems easier to use on Windows. Private repos are free on Bitbucket, and you get a handful of users for free on a team setup. Beyond five users in a team, pricing looks reasonable. With distributed systems it’s easy to work with a local repo to get the feel for it before committing to a host.

    Both mercurial and git are good; and quite similar.

    I get the feeling git has a larger crowd of followers. I started using GIT over mercurial, because I wanted to become more involved in open-source projects. Most of these use GIT. However, this may be less important to you.

    There’s a number of discussions on the internet which compare HG (mercurial) to GIT… for the mostpart, there’s not much difference.

    Thread Starter crawpdx

    (@crawpdx)

    Thanks for all the great info.

    Just getting a handle on terms and workflow is enough work but this gets me going in the right direction.

    Thanks again!

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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