Updating a staging/dev website's plugins

[Cynthia Lockley]

I’ve been using the information in the FAQ about using the same license for the production and dev sites. Doing a manual update on the dev website has been fine up to the previous update.

https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/using-one-license-for-your-live-and-dev-sites/
“If you need updates on the dev site, you can always move the license again or do a manual update with a latest version from your account’s downloads page.”

After the manual update and a refresh of the Plugins page, the plugins page shows that the latest versions are installed but it also says there is a newer version to download. If the version number in the notice about the newer version matches the version level of the installed version, why am I getting notified of a newer version for the one that is installed?

[Cliff]

Hi Cynthia.

Sorry to cause you confusion.

I don’t believe that KB article has been updated for an enhancement we rolled out a few months ago.

Basically, if your enter your license key on a site domain that is ‘localhost’, ends in ‘.dev’, and a variety of other site domains, it will “work” but it won’t actually appear as a registered site in your licenses / registered sites at https://theeventscalendar.com/license-keys/

Please let me know if this clears things up for you.

[Cynthia Lockley]

Cliff,

OK. I added my production license for events.stcwdc.org in the License page on my development site (dev.stcwdc.org). After I clicked Save Changes, I got:

“There is new version of The Events Calendar PRO available but your license key is out of installs. Visit the Events Calendar website to manage your installs, upgrade your license, or purchase a new one”

“There is new version of The Events Calendar: Eventbrite Tickets available but your license key is out of installs. Visit the Events Calendar website to manage your installs, upgrade your license, or purchase a new one.”

I then refreshed the Plugins page but there is no change to the messages on the Plugins page.

Will the messages on the development Licenses page about having no more installs affect the installs on the production site?

[Cliff]

Interesting.

I see your sites are registered and your licenses are valid.

I’d suggest deactivating all 3 and re-activating them. If that doesn’t work, I’d suggest deleting and re-installing all 3 plugins.

Deleting The Events Calendar or its add-on plugins will NOT delete any of your data if you delete it via the WordPress plugin manager because that’s how we’ve decided to code our plugin.

FYI: deleting any plugin via FTP or cPanel’s File Manager (i.e. deleting just the files from the server) will also ensure a plugin gets deleted (if you delete the entire plugin folder) without removing any data from the database. This can sometimes be helpful to know in cases where a plugin does run an uninstall routine to delete data (again, our plugins do not run such a routine at this time and probably never will).

You can also see the difference when you click to delete a plugin, like this.

[Cynthia Lockley]

Cliff,

I tried what you suggested for a manual update to the dev site–deleted all three plugin folders for my development website through FTP and then reinstalled them through FTP. That did not solve the problem as shown in the screen shot. The status on the Plugins page still shows the correct version is installed for all three plugins but the Pro and Eventbrite Tickets also say there is a new version at the same level and to add the license number to the settings.

I again added my production license for events.stcwdc.org in the License page on my development site (dev.stcwdc.org). I got the same messages as before:

“There is new version of The Events Calendar PRO available but your license key is out of installs. Visit the Events Calendar website to manage your installs, upgrade your license, or purchase a new one”

“There is new version of The Events Calendar: Eventbrite Tickets available but your license key is out of installs. Visit the Events Calendar website to manage your installs, upgrade your license, or purchase a new one.”

Perhaps the KB article https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/using-one-license-for-your-live-and-dev-sites/
“If you need updates on the dev site, you can always move the license again or do a manual update with a latest version from your account’s downloads page.” needs to be updated to say this no longer works?

I also tried the moving the license step above by disconnecting them from the production site and reconnecting them to the development site. When that was saved, the dev site’s Plugins page was corrected. But, when I moved the licenses back from the dev site to the production site, I am back where I started with the matched version levels on the dev site but telling me there is a new version.

In addition, the license numbers are still in the boxes but there is a new message at the top of the dev site’s Licenses page:
“You have entered license keys for The Events Calendar PRO and The Events Calendar: Eventbrite Tickets but your keys are out of installs. Visit the Events Calendar website to to manage your installs, upgrade your licenses, or purchase new ones.”

This same message also shows at the top of every Admin page in the dev site with the squid included so it takes up a lot of space.

Perhaps you could add a checkbox to the licenses page that we can use to indicate that the license numbers we put in are the production license numbers but this is a dev site, and then key the Plugins page to that checkbox so it doesn’t keep telling us to enter the license numbers?

If all these messages about the licenses on the dev site don’t affect the functioning of the plugins on the dev site, then I can live with the messy notices but it never used to do this before 4.3 when I did a manual update for the plugins or when I disconnected from the production site (http://events.stcwdc.org) / updated the plugins on the dev site (http://dev.stcwdc.org) / connected to the dev site / disconnected from the dev site / then reconnected with the production site. Doing a manual update was a lot easier but either way, it all still worked for testing the changes.

Even though the message on the dev site tells me my keys are out of installs (I don’t need to have automatic updates on the dev site–manual installs are just fine, or were), can I still get update installs on my production site with the licenses reconnected to that site?

[Cliff]

Thanks for all the details. Sorry you’re receiving this incorrect messaging. I see from your screenshot that those 3 plugins are at their latest versions.

I see from your https://theeventscalendar.com/license-keys/ page that your license keys for PRO and Eventbrite Tickets plugins are attached to “events.stcwdc.org”

Without re-assigning / moving any licenses, please share your System Information for both of your 2 sites. That will give me a lot of extra information to help diagnose the problem.

Thanks.

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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