Using GitHub
Introduction
GitHub is an online hosting service which uses the Git distributed version control system (DVCS). The differences to a "traditional" centralized VCS (like CVS or Subversion) include:
- Users get a self-contained repository that they can commit changes to, even when being offline.
- Changes can be pushed back to the parent repository or even to other repositories.
Having used CVS since its inception (2001), Geeklog switched to Mercurial after the release of Geeklog 1.5.1. This switch was preceded by a successful experiment using Mercurial during the 2008 Google Summer of Code. After Geeklog 2.1.1 was released in December of 2015 a decision was made to switch to using Git and having our net Git repositories hosted on GitHub.
Installing Git
There are a number of GUI Clients available for Git. The one we recommend for Windows and Mac operating systems is GitHub Desktop since it is the native client for GitHub (it also comes with Git Shell). Download links and instructions for installing and using this software is found on the GitHub Desktop website. There is no official GitHub Desktop for Linux. You will have use another Git GUI like SmartGitHg. It runs on Windows and Linux and supports not only Git but SVN and Mercurial as well. For other Linux Git GUI Clients please visit the Git website for suggestions.
Setup
An organization called Geeklog-Core was setup on GitHub to house all repositories for the Geeklog CMS. This includes Geeklog itself, the required pear libraries, tools, artwork, plugin toolkit, and the test framework. The Geeklog's Git repository is available from this URL:
This repository was converted from the Mercurial repository soon after the release of Geeklog 2.1.1.
A large number of Geeklog Plugins (Forum, Captcha, Ban, etc.) are also available at the GitHub organization called Geeklog-Plugins.
The easiest way to create a copy of the Geeklog repository on your computer, is to first create an account on GitHub if you don't already have one. Then install GitHub Desktop. Once you have logged into GitHub visit the Geeklog Repository and click on the download to desktop icon. This will start the process of retrieving the files from the Geeklog hosted repository and saving them in your local repository.
For Windows users with GitHub Desktop installed, you can enter the link below into your internet browser to retrieve the Geeklog Repository from GitHub:
github-windows://openRepo/https://github.com/Geeklog-Core/geeklog
