Summer of Code Revisions

Hey everyone! I’m Alex, one of the Google Summer of Code interns who will be hanging around here for the next couple of months. I currently study Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück in Germany — not too obvious to see the connection to web development there. Cognitive Science is actually splitted into 8 different modules. Neurobiology, Neuroinformatics, Philosophy, Psychology, Linguistics, Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science. I’m mostly focussing on the last two and even consider switching to a dual bachelor setup with Cognitive Science + Computer Science.

So, web development and WordPress are mostly just hobbies of mine — I hope to change this in the future. I did a couple of paid jobs creating WordPress websites and also have a couple of plugins in the repository. I really like the idea of open code and bringing web publishing forward this way. Not having one brand control so many websites directly is a huge advantage in comparison to other web publishing tools.

My project will be bringing WordPress native revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. to the theme and pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party editors. Some developers are of the opinion that it would be best to strip the code editors from WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. I think they are an important launch pad for average WordPress users to get into touch with their site’s code base. It’s a first step on the way to submitting a first patchpatch A special text file that describes changes to code, by identifying the files and lines which are added, removed, and altered. It may also be referred to as a diff. A patch can be applied to a codebase for testing. to core.

An obvious problem when enabling users to edit their websites code is that they might break things. Changes can result in fatal errors which might break their whole site. With code revisions it will be easy to reverse to a specific version of a faulty site when something breaks. The idea here is not to make the editors interesting to developers but to make them more comfortable to use for website owners.

Happy to work with you guys and to get some feedback. With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow 😉

#code-revisions, #weekly-update