WordPress Staging Site Support
The Software Licensing extension for Easy Digital Downloads provides your customers with seamless WordPress Plugin and Theme updates. To do this, users must typically activate their license key within the settings of your Plugin or Theme installed on their WordPress-powered site. This can be a challenge when working with a WordPress Staging Site, as a customer could be concerned that this would count towards their license activation counts, restricting them from activating their license key on their live site.
Staging sites are important to the workflow of any site, and as such, Software Licensing does not count local or staging environments towards a license’s activation count. To help Plugin and Theme creators, we support a number of staging environment configurations.
Hosting Service Staging Environments
Many hosts provide Staging environments, allowing site owners to test updates and new plugins before they add them to their live website. The Software Licensing extension for Easy Digital Downloads recognizes and supports several of the most popular hosting services in the WordPress ecosystem. Below is a list of specifically supported hosting services that provide custom staging environments.
- WP Engine
- InstaWP
- Cloudways
- Kinsta
- GoDaddy
- FlyWheel
- BlueHost
- HostGator
- SiteGround
If your host is not listed here, they may be using a more standard way of creating staging sites, allowing our Standard Detection rules to apply without specific rules.
If you are a hosting service and want to be added to this list, reach out to us through our support team and we will contact you about allowing your customers to activate Plugin & Theme licenses in your staging environments.
Standard Staging Environments
If the hosting provider does not provide a tool to generate a staging environment or is using a more standard URL for their staging environments, EDD supports the following subdomain patterns as WordPress Staging Site URLs.
- *.staging.example.org
- *.test.example.org
- staging-*.example.org
- dev.example.org
WP Environment Type
The Plugin Updater class included with Software Licensing’s sample plugin and theme supports the wp_get_environment_type()function that was added in WordPress 5.5.0. If the hosting service or custom staging environment sets the WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE constant accurately, Software Licensing will handle the detection of a staging environment automatically, regardless of the domain being used.