If you are a WordPress plugin developer, then this post is for you. There is very little documentation on how to effectively use the WordPress Subversion repository, and the repo architecture is critically flawed in its structure making “kosher” usage seem entirely buggy. Worse yet, the support in the WordPress forums is practically non-existant. For a more thorough explanation of this process, see our book on WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials, which features an entire chapter on dealing with SVN and the WordPress repository.
Below is the short summary of what is presented in the video.
Version: 0.5
svn commit . -m "My new version is ready"
svn copy https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/your-plugin/trunk https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/your-plugin/tags/0.5
Stable tag: 0.5
svn commit . -m "Updating the stable tag"
Ok, that was too quick? Well, we left out some important geeky points. The way WordPress’ download page works is that it looks at the readme.txt file at the HEAD of the repo, and then it follows the value listed there for Stable tag. If the Stable tag lists version 0.8, then the information from tags/0.8/readme.txt
is used to generate your plugin’s information page and the files in tags/0.8
are packaged up into a zip file and that’s what downloads when the user clicks the download link.
Can you see the problem with this setup? Normally, when you tag a directory in SVN, that copy is treated as a read-only reference, but in this setup, it is frequently easier and less prone to errors for you to go into the tags directory and make your edits. This is normally a bit no-no for version control!
So the safer way to do this is to develop your plugin normally inside the wp-content/plugins directory and submit to the trunk as you normally do. Once you’re ready to publish a release, go to a new folder somewhere on your hard drive and checkout your ENTIRE project, trunk, tags, and all. Then you can do your tagging operation locally, e.g. svn copy trunk tags/0.9
, and that will give you a new directory. You can update that directory’s readme.txt file and your plugin’s information header, then commit all of your code (trunk and all tags folders).
Hope that helps los dudes.
-- Everett Griffiths