One of the small hurdles to hosting a plugin on WordPress.org is the fact that you have to use SVN to ship your updates. Most developers are far more familiar with Git. It’s not difficult to learn how to use SVN for the sake of WordPress.org plugins, but many find it to be inconvenient. Ship…
Open source software makes up the vast majority of licensed code hosted on GitHub, as one of the primary features of the site is code sharing and collaboration. In of April 2015, GitHub reported 9.2 million users collaborating across 21.8 million repositories. For the past seven years since the site’s launch, one of the most…
GitHub Updater is a plugin that developers often use to enable automatic updates to GitHub or Bitbucket-hosted WordPress plugins and themes. The project was started in July 2013 by Andy Fragen, a trauma surgeon and plugin developer. Over the past two years GitHub Updater has received improvements from 14 contributors. Fragen’s work on GitHub Updater…
Open source projects often struggle with finding practical ways to recognize contributors. Although most contributors aren’t in it for the recognition, it’s nice for project leaders to have a way to showcase who is behind the work. The relative number of contributors on a project is often a good indicator of how many people are…
Git just announced version 2.2.1, a maintenance release that includes a security fix for a critical vulnerability that affects those using Windows and Mac OS X Git clients. This update also includes new releases with the same security fix for older Git versions. GitHub confirmed that GitHub for Windows and GitHub for Mac are both…
Today Matt Mullenweg delivered his annual State of the Word address at WordCamp San Francisco, with roughly 1,000 WordPress enthusiasts and contributors in attendance and hundreds more watching via livestream. Before jumping into the results of the survey, Mullenweg announced that this would be the last event held at Mission Bay conference center. Touch the…
Gitter.im is a new service that provides free and private chat rooms for open source projects on GitHub. It integrates with issue tracking, supports markdown, notifications, and has an activity feed featuring multiple third-party integrations. In order to use Gitter, you’ll need to sign in using your GitHub account. As you can see from the…
WordPress is excellent for writing posts privately by yourself and can be extended to allow collaborative writing with other registered authors. But what if you could open up your posts and revisions to even more contributors without requiring them to register to your site or even use WordPress? WordPress GitHub Sync is a new plugin…
Chris Wallace and his team at UpThemes have just pushed their new IssuePress plugin into private beta. This innovative new product is will make it possible for developers to provide public support for private Github repositories. The plugin allows you to assign a dedicated support page on your WordPress site where customers can create and…
The folks over at Sucuri have reminded us once again why it’s important to only download plugins from trusted sources. In a disturbing post published on the Sucuri blog, Denis Sinegubko highlights the dangers of using plugins from untrusted sources. In this post, we’ll talk about “patched” malicious premium plugins. We’ll talk about what they…
There are many factors that come into play when deciding where to host your open source WordPress plugin or theme. Who is your target audience? How much support do you want to offer? Is the project open for collaboration? For many developers this choice often comes down to WordPress.org vs. GitHub. In the past, hosting…
It’s amazing how much WordPress code is available on github. Many developers choose not to place their plugins on WordPress.org for one reason or another, but this makes their code less convenient for others to find. Using a plugin from github traditionally requires you to visit github, search for the plugin, download the zip file…
Themergency has a list of WordPress related projects to watch that are using GitHub as their source code repository instead of the traditional Subversion approach. In case you didn’t know it already, WordPress itself is also using GitHub except that it’s being synched every thirty minutes with the Subversion repository and only contains read-only access.…