I’ve long kept my WordPress sites in version control (and if you’re not doing the same, let Mark Jaquith tell you why you should), and I typically pull in themes and plugins as git submodules. I recently purchased the Genesis Theme to use on a website I’m building for my church, and I’m trying to figure out how best to put it in version control.

Because Genesis is a paid theme, I don’t really want to put it in a public GitHub repository, and thereby allow anyone to use it without paying. Though to be clear, it’s licensed under the GPL so I would have every right to post it publicly, I just don’t really want to. But it also seems wasteful to use one of my few private repos on GitHub just for this. It’d be really great if StudioPress had a git repo that paying customers had read access to that they could use for exactly this purpose. They have a GitHub account, so maybe there’s a private repo behind there and I just can’t see it?

I’m curious how others are handling this for Genesis, or any other paid WordPress plugin or theme that is also open source.