CI/CD project for automated releases

[lpm0073]

Fellow contributors, I've begun work to setup automated releases using semantic-release as the engine for managing version bump workflows. This project relies on us adopting a strict PR process for version updates, which shouldn't be a problem as thus far we've all been doing this voluntarily. However, it also depends on us adopting a more strict protocol for commit comments. see this semantic version style guide for details. I am performing this work in a new branch named 'next'.

I completed prototyping work on a smaller Python-only project named secure-logger. You'll find detailed run histories of automated processes in the "Actions" tab, and you can review the Releases and the change log to see examples of what we'll eventually have in this project.

There are multiple, complimentary goals to this endeavor:

• setup remote unit testing for memberpress_client. This will require setting up a remote MySQL connection. I can volunteer this to the project, unless any of you feel strongly about taking ownership of the remote unit testing aspect of this project.
• setup remote unit testing for setup.py, which is aimed at ensuring that changes merged to main do not break our build and PyPi deployment processes, even though I envision continuing to manually publish to PyPi.
• enable Dependabot for Python, npm (semantic-release) and Github Actions
• enable Mergify to automatically evaluate and approve PR's of minor updates to major packages generated by Dependabot
• automatically generate new Github package releases. These packages are largely ceremonial in that I assume that we're all deploying from PyPi. Nonetheless, the automated semantic-release tool is really fantastic, adding excellent release notes, Github tags, and consistent asset packages to the archive.
• automatically generate change log entries
• begin taking linting and code formatting a bit more seriously. I've already completed a first pass on this, which simply ensure that we abide by a bare minimum set of syntax-checking and style guidelines; mostly regarding our documentation. I've added quite a few new pre-commit checks which are intended to help us all do a better job of pushing the highest quality code possible.

I do NOT have any plans to automate releases to PyPi.

This project is not time sensitive (for me at least).