Version 1.9.1 of Paid Memberships Pro is out with a handful of bug fixes and some tweaks to our license nag. This fix in particular will help on sites that had multiple plugins using the Stripe API library.
Concerning Our License Prompts
The tweaks to our “license nag” (as we’ve named it) deserve a bit of explanation. Almost two years ago we launched our PMPro Plus membership here on the site, which includes access to our paid support forums but also allows you to use the WordPress dashboard to automatically update the plugins that we host on our own servers.
Since then, we’ve been selling PMPro Plus licenses on the site here, but we weren’t actually requiring a valid license to update the Plus addons.
There were relatively few people taking advantage of the lack of checks on our update server, so we didn’t bother to turn on the check. Now however, there are quite a few sites running PMPro with Plus licenses that try to update against our servers without valid licenses. We enabled the license check in v1.9 to encourage those sites to purchase a license (or alternatively download zip files from GitHub to update their addons).
We also added a “license nag” that pops up once a week in the WP dashboard if you don’t have a PMPro license key set. Our intention for this nag is to kindly suggest that sites using PMPro on a production site purchase a support license. These support licenses pay us to support our customers, but they also support the PMPro platform in general by giving us cashflow to pay our developers/etc. I know that as a user of open source software myself, often times the decision of which projects I support and which I don’t comes down to simply whether or not I was asked for support.
We are still committed to PMPro as an open source project first and foremost.
All of our code is GPLv2 and available for free on WordPress.org or GitHub.com. At the same time, we want to encourage users who are willing to pay to purchase licenses to help support themselves and the platform.
It’s hard to strike a balance between asking nicely and being annoying. We’re not there yet. The v1.9 update was both unclear and aggressive in how the license notification worked. We’ll continue to monitor things and consider other changes (maybe making it less than once per week for sites without a license), but in v1.9.1 we have made a couple of changes to the license nag:
- On new installs, we will wait 1 week before showing the nag at all. This gives new users time to discover our website on their own or to try out the plugin and deactivate it if they aren’t using it. We didn’t mean for the license notification to be so “in your face” when the plugin was activated.
- The “Invalid Key” message is no longer showing if you haven’t even tried to enter a key. The error message is also yellow vs. red to note it as a warning vs. an error.
We’re also working on updates to our pricing page and documentation on the site here to make it more clear who should purchase which license.
Links
Please update Paid Memberships Pro from the plugins page of your WordPress dashboard. You can also get the latest version of PMPro here or version 1.9.1 specifically here.
Change Log
The full list of updates is below.
- BUG FIX: Fixed the code checking if the Stripe library is already loaded to compatability issues with other plugins bundling the Stripe API library.
- BUG FIX: Cancel code now properly uses preg_replace when sanitizing the list of level ids to cancel.
- FIX/ENHANCEMENT: Removed test/doc code from Stripe and Braintree libraries.
- ENHANCEMENT: Now pausing the license nag for the first week of use and removed the “invalid” error if no key is being used.
