Thanks to the generosity of Joseph Moore, giving his time to help/make us understand the philosophy and practical steps of using Git, in particular Github, we now have a structure to the development of our WordPress template code.
If those words – Git, Github – don’t mean anything to you, they might well do in the future.
Control over changes
Git is a way to strictly control changes over things. I use the all-encompassing ‘things’ because it not just code (Git’s roots), because graphics and other files can be included. It’s also not just code. Git is also expanding beyond its familiar use in code, to other writing as well, as demonstrated by GitBook.
We’re using it to control the version of code and graphics that make up our WordPress template – and hence the display of our publication to the public. Initially our mobile-specific WP theme.
It brings the discipline to ensure that any changes made to the template are incremental, while bringing added advantages like you don’t litter the code with changes comments. It also brings the advantage of a central backup of the code.
Branching
‘Branching’ is intrinsic with this Version Control (which Git is an instance of), meaning that code can be safely developed by more than one person, in more than one location, without those distributed changes overwriting each other.