Possibly the best thing about WordPress is how simple it makes most tasks. Just log in to the administration, click here and there and boom, you have three new plugins installed, a new theme activated etc. People love this, and we do too.
There’s a flip side to it, however. Once the site is deployed and used by real visitors, those buttons actually become sort of a threat to the site because they make all the changes irreversibly and straight in the production. That is a problem because 3rd party plugins sometimes have bugs, are incompatible with each other, the theme might need updates etc. There are ways to deal with it but it’s a tricky job – so tricky that over 70% of WP sites in Alexa Top 1 Million gave up on updates.
Now this is an interesting project – version control for WordPress. Imagine the dizzy highs we could reach if we could roll-back our WordPress site (plugins, themes, hacks’n’all) to before we started fiddling with it and it all came crashing down? Or do things ‘properly’ and instead of making changes on the live/production site we could use a structured test environment and only roll out the changes when we’re happy. Dream no more, Versionpress is on its’ way…