May
26

If you Hack, you should Track

Posted by WordPress Modder under Hacks, how to

If you read my previous post, you’re already aware that I’m fairly new to WPMU, and this post is directed to those users who are just starting to find their way into the multi-user WordPress environment. Following is a quick tip that will help you immensely in the long run, but first some background information.

Through my first experience with WPMU, I have spent many hours searching the forums while trying to determine the best plugins and code hacks to accomplish the goals of the site I am developing. I’ve downloaded dozens of these plugins and have made many several changes to WPMU core files. During this process, I was working with version 1.3.3 and then came a new version, 1.5 RC1, and then yet another, the official 1.5.1 version which integrated the changes that were made to the standard WordPress 2.5.1 backend. As you might imagine, with all these upgrades, and with me including code hacks in between, things can quickly get out of hand and confusing.

The purpose of this post is to remind all new WPMU users, and even veterans, to TRACK YOUR CHANGES. This may seem like a no-brainer, but with as many code hacks as I’ve tried to get things working the way I want, if I wasn’t tracking what I was doing, I would quickly become lost when I needed to upgrade and preserve my changes, or to troubleshoot when something goes wrong.

Tracking my changes couldn’t be simpler. I just keep a simple text document on my local system that I enter the changes into. When it’s time to upgrade or refresh myself on what changes I’ve done, I just open it up and have a look.

WPMU Core File Edits

I hope this helps make your WPMU experience just a bit easier.

p.s. The WPMU site I’m working on is still in development, but will be open for beta testing soon. Please stay tuned here and also at here for further announcements.

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8 Responses to “If you Hack, you should Track”

  1. Austin Says:
    May 26th, 2008 at 9:18 am

    You should consider running your copy of WPMU off of Subversion. Then generating a patch file of changes is as simple as svn diff, and the patch file with a little editing can usually be applied to the next version when you upgrade the core files.
  2. WordPress Modder Says:
    May 26th, 2008 at 9:37 am

    Austin,

    Thanks for the advice. I haven’t had any experience at all with Subversion. I will look into using it. If you know of any good tutorials, or can share your methods, I would be very grateful to be made aware of them.
  3. Andrea Says:
    May 26th, 2008 at 10:32 am

    Great suggestions guys. :)
  4. Austin Says:
    May 26th, 2008 at 10:54 am

    Here are two introductions to WordPress and subversion:

    codex.wordpress.org/Using_Subversion
    codex.wordpress.org/Installing/Updating_WordPress_with_Subversion

    You can view a list of the WPMU versions available over Subversion with the following command (remove the spaces between the h t t p letters):
    svn list h t t p://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-mu/tags/

    [Aside: You might want to warn commenters that they will lose any submitted comments with links that have h t t p in them because of an "edublogs" spam filter.]
  5. WordPress Modder Says:
    May 26th, 2008 at 11:10 am

    @ Andrea

    Thanks!

    @ Austin,

    Thanks for the further information! I’ll be reading up on this method and post back with my progress.
  6. Dr. Mike Wendell Says:
    May 27th, 2008 at 4:31 pm

    +1 for the svn as that’s how we manage the nearly 2 dozen sites we have.

    It also makes updating out of the mu trac a lot easier.
  7. WordPress Modder Says:
    May 29th, 2008 at 10:43 am

    I have had a chance to read up on Subversion. I wonder if you can recommend your favorite client for Windows?
  8. Dr. Mike Wendell Says:
    June 4th, 2008 at 10:47 am

    We use TortoiseSVN. http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

    Just a quick mention that if you want to try out trac for free, http://assembla.com is a great place that offers free trac and svn hosting.

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