Sorry for being slightly off-topic but we’re going to open-source VersionPress soon and you guys around the Roots project 1) have some pretty strong opinions on WordPress which we can often relate to , 2) you run a popular OSS project already, so I came for a bit of advice.
Without going into too much detail, are there any things you think we should be careful about? We’ve tried to cover all the standard things like being on GitHub, having a (hopefully) clear CONTRIBUTING.md file, license etc. but maybe there are other things we should consider. If anyone of you wanted access to the repo to have a look, just let me know. Thanks!
A CONTRIBUTING.md file is good but expect most users to not read it
I’m not sure what VersionPress is built with, but use https://travis-ci.org/ and setup at least some basic testing.
We don’t like using GitHub issues for support requests and instead have this Discourse setup to deal with support. It’s definitely been nice to keep support separate from the repo.
VersionPress looks cool. Definitely interested in checking it out.
Regarding tests, we actually have more test code than production code but the most value is in heavy integration tests – Selenium clicking on all sorts of buttons in wp-admin and the asserts making sure that the Git repo contains the right commits, DB being in the right state etc. Those things are not easy to run on Travis at all, and we probably won’t have a suitable CI in place in time but it’s a very good point and we need to get it done relatively soon.
As for the support, we already have a separate support repo, https://github.com/versionpress/support. I for some reason don’t like Discourse too much but GitHub is fine for this and we’ll do our best to point people to this repo first and only then let them creating issues in the main one.
Do you know anything about CLAs? Most companies doing OSS seem to have them but I haven’t seen them used for any WP project and I’d generally like to keep overhead to a minimum.
Our tests setup a fresh WP site via WP-CLI, need Git available in the environment etc. Will soucelabs give us the freedom / flexibility to have all that?
, 2) you run a popular OSS project already, so I came for a bit of advice.