SPServices and Github – This Time I Mean It

I’ve had some false starts moving SPServices to Git and/or Github over the last few years. If it weren’t for Josh McCarty’s (@joshmcrty) help on every release, I wouldn’t even have gotten SPServices onto cdnjs, since they use Github. (Yes, SPServices is available via CDN at cdnjs and has been for several years now.) I’m just tremendously behind the times.

So it’s only taken me about two years, but I’m really biting the bullet on Github this time. I’ve just read through a bunch of great suggestions I got when I abortively tried to move things to Github long ago and I’m curious given the amount of time that has passed those folks might do differently.

Here are my assumptions/preferences:

• Simple, simple, simple
• I’m using a public folder in my Dropbox as my “CDN” for development. I think Paul Tavares (@paul_tavares) knows where it is, but no one else does. This Dropbox-based CDN helps immensely for testing, since I can just point my script references there in all of my test environments. In case anyone is wondering, I’d love to use OneDrive (either flavor) for this, but it just doesn’t work the way it does redirects. I can get a clean URL from Dropbox that just plain works.
• I’m leaning toward WebStorm for my IDE these days. (Where I can’t install it in client environments, I’ll still use SharePoint Designer and/or Sublime Text.) Webstorm has very robust integration with Github that even seems to make sense to me. I’ve got my Webstorm project embedded in the Dropbox CDN I mentioned above.
• In case you’re wondering, I do probably 99% of the work on SPServices, so my ideas for version control have been extremely simple to date. SPServices is a one-file project and I make virtually all the changes to it. SPServices wouldn’t be what it is without excellent help and contributions from people like Josh McCarty and Paul Tavares; I couldn’t have gotten to this point without them. But as far as the actual edits and testing, it’s mostly me.
• I’ll continue hosting the docs and downloads on Codeplex, at least for the foreseeable future. This makes sense because of the volume of documentation and the great discussions history that’s already there.

What I’m looking for is best (better) practices, build ideas, etc. SPServices will continue to live as long as people find it useful, and I want to keep building it and supporting it. That said, it’s my “side project” – something I do for fun and learning opportunities. So any ideas should be labor *saving*, not labor *producing*.

It’s my hope that – as they mentioned in the suggestions I linked to above – more people may decide to contribute with the move to Github. Who knows, maybe we can haul it into RESTland along with SharePoint 2013.

Today I posted the latest beta for the 2014.02 release. I expect to make it a stable release in about a week or so, since quite a few people have been downloading it and testing it as I’ve made changes over the last few months. I’ll write more about why you *really* should upgrade to this new version in an upcoming post. (Thanks yet again to Paul Tavares on this one.)

Thanks in advance for any ideas you can toss into the mix. Feel free to reply in the comments here or on the older thread in the Codeplex Discussions.