Hi, @tyrannous thank you for your message.
We do not use the “tags” because we cannot guarantee that the previous versions of the plugin will work with the updated APIs. Our team is very small and maintaining backward compatibility is very resource-consuming, so we’d rather focus on development rather than maintaining multiple versions of our APIs.
May I ask you if you were trying to download a previous version and why?
We are considering switching to GitHub to make our development process more transparent and available to the community.
Cheers
Mario
Hi @mlamacchia, thank you very much for your fast response.
We do not use the “tags” because we cannot guarantee that the previous versions of the plugin will work with the updated APIs.
To be honest, for me, providing previous versions is not the same as maintaining backward compatibility. In fact, the absolute majority of all plugins here on WordPress use tags, and there are certainly many whose previous versions no longer work. If a user chooses to use an old version, IMHO it’s completely their fault if things break on them and not something you should care about.
BTW, that’s exactly what SemVer is for: If you introduce BC breaking changes, increase the major version number and you are done.
May I ask you if you were trying to download a previous version and why?
I client of ours complained about the live chat feature “not working” anymore, so we wanted to roll back to a previous version of the plugin to check if it works with this version.
Luckily, you (probably inadvertently) provide an old version (v7.52.0) on your homepage (vs. v7.52.143 here).
We are considering switching to GitHub to make our development process more transparent and available to the community.
That’s good to hear. In fact, you could use GitHub Actions to deploy releases automatically to the WordPress SVN repository, so you wouldn’t have to fiddle around with two version control systems. Example action: https://github.com/10up/action-wordpress-plugin-deploy
