I am also skeptical of this plugin but I think almost all of your points are moot.
There is big market for a solution that lets users backup and restore the filesystem and a database on a more granular level. Not being able to easily and conveniently revert changes that are made easily is one of the biggest pain points in managing a WordPress site. If you update WordPress and find that a critical plugin doesn't work, there is no convenient way to undo the update. Of course, ideally, these kinds of things are tested on a staging server first, but the truth is only a minority of sites utilize a staging server in this manner.
A lot of pain around websites is dealing with changes to the filesytem and database. To have a simple way of tracking changes and reverting changes is a boon. Both normal end-users and developers will jump for joy with a unified tool for this.
You can't compare this with many of the existing backup solutions either. You get far more detail (which helps with debugging) and far more incremental control when you have something git-like managing it all.
I'm pretty sure the solution would not be dependent on being accessible from a site's WP backend. But then, I don't know the specifics yet.
I don't see the problem raising money through crowdfunding for this either, from their point of view. It's a sound business strategy that validates a market and provides some investment.
My hesitation is this, we have no idea if they even have the skills to pull something like this off. Because it's not going to be easy. The WP environment can really vary from one site to the next (different server setups/different plugins/themes etc) and you have to make it work on them all. That's just a huge undertaking. I think you'd need a pretty big team with a ton of experience and a lot more than 30k to get close to pulling it off.
Thanks, that answers many points very well. VersionPress seems to interest many people so hopefully we'll get chance to properly build it.
You also seem to be very realistic about how large this undertaking is - you're right and we know how big of a thing we're trying to build. That's why we're realistic about our goals for v1 and don't promise more than we can deliver. To support all the complex 3rd party plugins and various hosting environments is something that will come over time. But we have to start somewhere and we believe that we are approaching the problem from the right angle. Thanks!
There is big market for a solution that lets users backup and restore the filesystem and a database on a more granular level. Not being able to easily and conveniently revert changes that are made easily is one of the biggest pain points in managing a WordPress site. If you update WordPress and find that a critical plugin doesn't work, there is no convenient way to undo the update. Of course, ideally, these kinds of things are tested on a staging server first, but the truth is only a minority of sites utilize a staging server in this manner.
A lot of pain around websites is dealing with changes to the filesytem and database. To have a simple way of tracking changes and reverting changes is a boon. Both normal end-users and developers will jump for joy with a unified tool for this.
You can't compare this with many of the existing backup solutions either. You get far more detail (which helps with debugging) and far more incremental control when you have something git-like managing it all.
I'm pretty sure the solution would not be dependent on being accessible from a site's WP backend. But then, I don't know the specifics yet.
I don't see the problem raising money through crowdfunding for this either, from their point of view. It's a sound business strategy that validates a market and provides some investment.
My hesitation is this, we have no idea if they even have the skills to pull something like this off. Because it's not going to be easy. The WP environment can really vary from one site to the next (different server setups/different plugins/themes etc) and you have to make it work on them all. That's just a huge undertaking. I think you'd need a pretty big team with a ton of experience and a lot more than 30k to get close to pulling it off.