This is a very transformative moment for the Varying Vagrant Vagrants project.
About a week ago, I reached out to Jake with a proposal to move VVV from under the wing of 10up to an organization of its own. We’ve been cruising along for just over a year, have around 125 unique visitors on the repository a day, and have a nice regular community of contributors. We have received pull requests from just around 40 contributors (!!!) and the issues are constantly a lively place of discussion.
Jake immediately agreed and we were able to talk through the process and the future very quickly. 10up has been a gracious and excellent host for VVV this entire time—the farewell post is great—and I’m looking forward to future steps we can take as a community now that we’re on our own.
I’d like to think that the goal to bring Vagrant to the forefront of WordPress developers’ minds has been accomplished. Through VVV and other related projects, the use of a development environment that closely matches production has come a long way.
I do think that VVV is the best tool out there for contributing to WordPress core. We provide stable, trunk, and develop versions of WordPress and everything needed to run the Grunt build tools and PHPUnit unit tests.
With that in mind, I think we should be able to line up a few goals.
- Continue being the place for a WordPress core development environment. This primarily means that we stay on top of the tools that core introduces into the development flow. Providing an approachable way to use these tools and documentation will go a long way.
- Directly related to goal one, some of the advancements we make should be around testing multiple versions of everything. If we can make it easy to fire up a PHP 5.x environment and test Nginx or Apache with WordPress 3.x or 4.x, that would be amazing.
- VVV has an excellent method for auto site setups. Over time we’ve had some nice demand for a few that could help quite a bit. It would be great to see a couple that provide basic setups for WordPress multisite and WordPress under Apache rather than our default of Nginx.
- Bring other tools to the forefront of WordPress developers’ minds. It may be great to see versions of VVV that harness Salt, Puppet, or Chef rather than the bash scripting that we’ve forced upon the project so far. VVV has an opportunity to be a learning tool for all of us in exploring methods of testing, provisioning, and deployment.
Right.
So please chime in with any suggestions that you may have. I’d love to toss the keys to a few new repositories over to anybody that’s interested in building out new tools. Feel free to use the main VVV repository under the Varying Vagrant Vagrants organization to open an issue and discuss your thoughts. We can split things off as needed.
Over time we’ll get more organized and setup a more official forum for discussions as well as some contributing guidelines. I’m going to reach out to a few regular contributors and get them added as committers. We also need to spend some time with licensing to see if we can get away with GPL for everything or if another would be more applicable to the work that we’re doing.
That’s that. Thank you all for being so great. Here’s to the next year of VVV. 
- Varying Vagrant Vagrants organization on GitHub: http://github.com/varying-vagrant-vagrants/
- VVV on GitHub: http://github.com/varying-vagrant-vagrants/vvv/
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