// Glossary
Changelog & release notes glossary
The terminology of changelogs and release communication, defined in plain English with Spanish equivalents. Same concepts, many names — changelog, release notes, notas de versión, what's new — this page maps them all.
Changelog
ES: changelog / registro de cambios
A changelog is a chronological record of every notable change made to a software product — new features, fixes, improvements, and breaking changes — ordered newest first. It can live in a CHANGELOG.md file in the repository, on a public web page, or both. A changelog is written once per release and is the canonical answer to "what changed, and when?".
Release notes
ES: notas de versión / notas de la versión
Release notes are the human-readable announcement of a single release: what shipped, why it matters, and what users should do about it. Where a changelog is the full historical record, release notes are one entry of it, usually written for customers rather than developers. In practice the two terms overlap heavily and many teams use them interchangeably.
Notas de versión
EN: release notes
Notas de versión es el término en español para release notes: el anuncio legible de lo que cambió en una versión concreta de un producto de software — qué se añadió, qué se corrigió y qué debe hacer el usuario. Herramientas como ShipNotes las generan automáticamente con IA a partir de las PRs mergeadas de cada release.
What's new
ES: novedades
"What's new" is the product-facing label for a changelog, common in app stores and in-app panels. It carries the same content as release notes but emphasizes benefit over mechanics — a "What's new" entry says what users can now do, not which functions were refactored. If your users are non-technical, your changelog should read like a What's new feed.
Conventional Commits
ES: commits convencionales
Conventional Commits is a commit-message convention — prefixes like feat:, fix:, and chore!, plus an optional scope — that makes git history machine-parseable. Tools such as semantic-release and standard-version read these prefixes to bump versions and assemble changelogs automatically. Its weakness: the output quality depends entirely on the discipline and phrasing of every commit author. PR-based generators like ShipNotes work without this convention.
Semantic Versioning (SemVer)
ES: versionado semántico
Semantic Versioning is the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH numbering scheme (for example 2.4.1): the major number changes on breaking changes, minor on new backwards-compatible features, and patch on fixes. SemVer tells machines and humans how risky an upgrade is, and changelog tooling commonly groups entries under the version number of the release that shipped them.
Keep a Changelog
ES: convención Keep a Changelog
Keep a Changelog (keepachangelog.com) is the most widely adopted format convention for CHANGELOG.md files: one section per version with its date, and entries grouped under Added, Changed, Deprecated, Removed, Fixed, and Security. It is a format for humans — it deliberately excludes raw commit dumps. Most changelog tools, ShipNotes included, produce output compatible with its categories.
Release automation
ES: automatización de releases
Release automation is the practice of turning the release process — versioning, tagging, building, publishing artifacts, and communicating changes — into a pipeline that runs without manual steps. Changelog generation is the communication half of release automation: once tagging is automated, tools like ShipNotes automate the announcement that should accompany every release.
GitHub release
ES: release de GitHub
A GitHub release is a tagged, named snapshot of a repository published through GitHub, optionally with notes and binary assets attached. Releases fire a webhook event, which is what integrations subscribe to — ShipNotes, for example, starts drafting release notes the moment a release is published or a tag is pushed.
Merged PR (pull request)
ES: PR mergeada / solicitud de cambios fusionada
A merged pull request is a reviewed set of changes that has been accepted into the main branch. PRs carry a title, a description, labels, and discussion — much richer context than individual commit messages. That context is why PR-based changelog generators produce more readable notes than commit-parsing ones: the summary a human wrote for review doubles as source material for the release notes.
Hosted changelog page
ES: página de changelog alojada
A hosted changelog page is a public web page, run by a service rather than your own infrastructure, where your release notes are published — for example getshipnotes.app/changelog/your-product. It gives the changelog a stable URL customers can bookmark, search engines can index, and feeds (RSS) can syndicate, without your team maintaining a separate site.
RSS feed
ES: fuente RSS
An RSS feed is a machine-readable XML version of a content stream that lets users and tools subscribe to updates. For changelogs, RSS means customers, internal dashboards, and aggregators get notified of each release without visiting the page. Every ShipNotes changelog page ships with an RSS 2.0 feed automatically.
Want the concepts in context?
Read the complete guide to changelogs for SaaS products for how these pieces fit together, or how ShipNotes works for the automated pipeline.