Version Control WordPress Website with themes installed

Question

Being new to Wordpress development ecosystem have few queries which I m stumbled upon currently. Have installed wordpress and it was working as expected. Had installed a theme to the website recently to the local working copy. Also, added 2 more members to the team which was previously single person and thus made the code version controlled with bitbucket server repository.

Now, the issue is when the new developers cloned the remote repository to their local machine ( entire wordpress with installed theme ) is available. But its not working properly as the new pages/links/menus/images added are not reflecting for the other's local .

Would like to know the general thumbrules which needs to be followed while version controlling Wordpress. Is the added themes/additional code changed files etc. only need to be version controlled instead of the whole Wordpress files? In my scenario what would be the changes I need to do ( any files which I need to configure to get the latest repository code to run locally ) Would we need to version control the Wordpress including the Database? Please advise.

Answer 1

Yes the main issue you have there is all the things you want are within the database. There are version control things for db but not sure how best they work... so you either export and share you db with them, or all work off a remote db from a server. You can change db credentials, including ip address etc in wp-config.

As for version control, I only save my theme in git and the wp-config etc etc... the bare minimum I can. Then I use composer https://getcomposer.org/ to pull in wordpress and make use of https://wpackagist.org/ to get plugins.

Roots did a nice introduction to composer and WordPress - where I started learning from and is worth a look: https://roots.io/using-composer-with-wordpress/