Simba Plugins Updates / Licensing / Renewals Manager FAQs

The free base “Plugins Manager” plugin that the WooCommerce connector works with can be obtained from the wordpress.org plugins directory. Search for “Simba plugin updates manager”.

In WooCommerce, edit the product.

Add two custom meta fields. N.B. These are not product attributes, but custom fields. To display the “custom fields” meta box (seen in the screenshot below), you must use the “screen options” in the top-right of the product editing screen.

1. simbamanager_key : the value of this should equal your plugin slug (i.e. the slug of the plugin you are selling), followed by a colon, followed by the word all, followed by a colon, followed by how many months you wish a purchase to create a valid licence for (e.g. 12, for 1 year – or -1 for unlimited). (If you are using plugins with built-in add-ons (an expert feature), the “all” can be modified to indicate the specific add-on for the plugin).
2. simbamanager_licences : this is optional, and is used to indicate how many licences this purchase is for (default: 1). For a variable product, you instead enter a comma-separated list of variation IDs followed by a colon, followed by the number of licences for each variation.

Here is an example (of the entry for this product itself, in our shop):

For the code to add to your own plugins, to connect them back to your updates server (i.e. your WordPress install that has the Simba Plugins Manager installed on it), follow this link to the Github project.

Yes; these are counted and stored by plugin and by day.

The main parameters for the `udmanager` shortcode are as follows:

slug: The slug of the plugin that you wish to show information for. This needs to match what you have set in the general plugin configuration (which in turn, should match the plugin’s directory name).

userid: The WordPress user ID that the plugin belongs to; i.e. the user ID of the account that you have set the plugin up in in the plugins manager.

showaddons: If your plugin is set up in the plugins manager to use the ‘add-ons’ mode, and you want to show per-add-on information, then set this to true.

showunpurchased: If set to “true”, then show information even if there are no purchases for the indicate plugin/add-ons.

By default, a licence owner can always release a licence from a site by using the “Disconnect” button on the “Plugins” page in their WordPress dashboard. This is the recommended way.
However, if the licence owner no longer has access to that page (e.g. the site was deleted, or belongs to a client who no longer permits them to have access), then this capability becomes available in their account area on your site (assuming that you have used the relevant shortcode to show them their licences there) 30 days after an update was last checked for – after this time, it’s assumed that the plugin is no longer installed on the site. If you want them to be able to release it before this, then you can use the filter shown below on your site; in this example, they can release a licence at any time:

add_filter('updraftmanager_entitlement_when_can_be_reset', function() { return -1; });