Version Number

A quick explanation of the version number on the site, since I will refer to them in the posts as I progress.

As I write this the version number is 181r32

That means that the subversion code repository has been updated one hundred eighty-one times and the database schema has changes thirty-two times. 

The code repository is where all of the little text files that make up the web application are stored. It is a very clever bit of software residing on a server up in the cloud and it keeps track of all of the previous versions of each file. So if we wanted to rollback to a previous version of the code that would be possible and even pretty easy. As we are coding we are changing little pieces of text across a bunch of different files. Subversion is the program which keeps track of all of those little files and makes sure that the proper ones are uploaded to the web server when we decide to push the changes to the production server.

The database is the critical engine behind the dynamically generated web pages. When we first started we had a few tables of information. As we moved along we continued to add more tables and more columns to the exist tables to keep track of more complex information. Now, for instance, the table of Posts for a closebunch has a column for “filter,” which can help return a set of Posts that have not been approved for that closebunch yet.

I will often refer to versions that don’t appear on the production site. Those are just code changes that are passed back and forth between the programmers (and the programmers different machines).