PBJ License Manager 1.3.0: The Menu Is Now the Instructions
A quality-of-life release for PBJ License Manager. The admin now walks you through selling a plugin in the order you actually do it, and every screen is written in plain English. Nothing functional changed.
PBJ License Manager 1.3.0 is out. If you sell a WordPress plugin from your own site, this is the release that stops the licence server feeling like a licence server. Nothing about how it works has changed. Everything you look at has.
The menu is now the instructions
Before, you got one page with six tabs and a fair guess at which to open first. Now the menu opens on Start here and the screens sit in the order the job is actually done:
- 1. What you sell — one entry per plugin. You do this once.
- 2. Upload the file — the zip your buyers install. This is the only screen most releases need.
- 3. Give out keys — where keys turn up when somebody pays you, and where you make one by hand.
A live checklist at the top shows which of those are set up and which are not, and links straight to the screen that fixes it.
Written for a person, not a developer
Every screen has been rewritten at about a ninth-grade reading level. The jargon is gone, or explained the first time it appears. The update manifest is the update address. The signing secret is the download link lock. The API key is the checkout password. Revoking a key is switching it off — and the screen says, plainly and in more than one place, that doing so never stops a customer’s plugin working.
All of that is label-only. Your keys, your buyers’ activations and every integration you have built are untouched.
Start here answers the questions you actually have
The walkthrough runs to eight sections. Three of them are the ones people were previously working out for themselves:
- What your buyer does — the four steps at their end, plus a table of what each kind of bad key looks like on their site. Short version: their plugin keeps running in every single case.
- Putting out a new version — a bug fix is one click. Charging again for version 3 is two steps, and the page is explicit about doing them in the right order.
- When something goes wrong — the six real failures, listed in the order they usually turn out to be true.
And one thing that was quietly broken
Uploading a file with the version box left empty used to do nothing whatsoever. No file, no error, no clue. It now tells you what is missing.
Upgrading
Update through your Plugins screen as usual. There is no migration, no settings to re-enter, and no downtime for anyone holding one of your keys. Old bookmarks into the admin redirect to the new screens on their own, carrying your search and filters with them.
Full release history: the PBJ License Manager changelog.