Anybody who has ran or developed a WordPress-powered site, be it a humble blog or something more complex, knows that it’s pretty easy to make undesirable changes. This can be either content-related or a change to the WordPress theme or plugin you’re running. While backing up is crucial, a primitive backup doesn’t always let you roll back to the exact point where everything was fine.
Enter VersionPress, a Prague-based startup that offers version control for WordPress. The company essentially wants to create an ‘undo button’ for changes you make to a WordPress site, with software built on top of Git, the popular open source version control system. To help further develop its offering, VersionPress has picked up $400,000 backing from Prague’s Credo Ventures.
“WordPress is a great publishing platform but has certain drawbacks that affect almost any website powered by it,” VersionPress founder Borek Bernard tells TechCrunch. “One example is that if something breaks a site, be it a failed update or a human mistake, there is no easy way back. It’s like if MS Office had all the rich functionality but no undo button. It’s hard to imagine but WordPress is like that today, which we aim to fix.”
Calling itself ‘WordPress meets Git’, VersionPress, which is currently running a paid-for Early Access Program, aims to offer full version control for the popular blogging/CMS platform. Unlike incremental backups, no matter how often you run them, proper versioning means you can revert changes at any time.
“The nice thing about VersionPress is that we do not have a single feature in mind; instead, we focus on the core problem which is versioning,” adds Bernard .”You can find it everywhere today, from Wikipedia to Google Docs to virtually every software project in the world, and it revolutionized many of the areas it touched. VersionPress is the first tool to bring it properly to the world of WordPress, including files and the database (the latter being historically the biggest challenge).”
More “technically exciting”, he says, is that VersionPress isn’t re-inventing the versioning wheel but instead relies on Git, “a world-class system” used by some of the biggest software projects in the world, citing the Linux kernel, Twitter, and Facebook as examples.
This means that VersionPress integrates with advanced workflows for teamwork, staging — that is testing site changes before they go live — and many other available tools built to run on Git.