VersionPress is a free and open source version control plugin for WordPress built on Git.
We increase major version numbers quite rapidly, e.g., VersionPress is at 3.0 at the time of writing this, but that does not mean it is production-ready.
We try to be very clear about the project status. We would love it to be magically stable soon but unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. Relational databases and (sometimes) crazily coded WordPress plugins do not fit well into the version control workflows, but we're already quite far in terms of the core technology and I'm confident WordPress will be a fully versioned platform one day.
The 'merge databases' feature sounds like either a sweet victory of immutable data that makes life easier all around OR something truly horrible that never should have been born.
If these guys have solved the WP devops problem, they will be millionaires and candidates for canonization.
Charging for a GPL'd software (all WordPress plugins have to be GPL, at least in practice) is tricky and most companies in the WordPress space focus on services. Which is what we'll do as well. The technology itself, however, will be free and stay free.
This is a problem that's bugged me for a long time - it's good to see people working on it. Deploying and managing most traditional CMSes is a nightmare, IMO.
MODX has had something similar for a while with Gitify[1] for the site structure and VersionX[2] for content, but I haven't had much of a chance to use them.
It's bugged me too, almost to the point of me thinking I was crazy. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how people were handling these problems with WordPress. And frankly I'm still baffled. I'd get these looooongggg schpeles about workflows tangential to the actual problem and then finally the admission that you just write down or remember the changes you made on staging, and make them on prod as well.
I put a client's site in a git repo once, but I never figured out how to safely and effectively git the database too. Kudos to VersionPress! I've only learned about them today but they seem to be doing a really solid job.
Depends how often it changes. In my case I had a db that was a small number of slowly-changing configuration records (a typical web site would probably also be similar) and a large number of log records. I just serialized it once a day and checked everything but the log records into a git repo. The log records were just saved like standard syslog records in two places. Worked fine the one time we needed to restore.
VersionPress is a free and open source version control plugin for WordPress built on Git.
We increase major version numbers quite rapidly, e.g., VersionPress is at 3.0 at the time of writing this, but that does not mean it is production-ready.