Have you ever installed a plugin in your WordPress application and are puzzled why it’s not showing up after activation?
We provide a step-by-step guide to ensure you can seamlessly integrate any plugin into your WordPress application. So, let’s dive in and find out how you can turn this minor setback into a successful and productive experience!
User Question: #
“I have installed the plugin ‘Fancy Product Designer’ on my ModernmiB version. After activating, it doesn’t show up. Any thoughts?”
Versions? #
Versions are an environment your tenants (WP installations) run in. Within a Version, all tenants share the same codebase: plugins, themes, and language files. Their databases are always separate.
Support: It’s correct if you don’t see the plugin in your Tenants (websites). You can see in the Console that the tenants are current in your “ClassicPNN” Version. The version determines the available Plugins, Themes, and Language files for your tenants. So if a tenant runs on a version without the plugin, it will not show.
Move your tenants to update the code #
You can move tenants between versions to change their codebase. This lets you introduce or update features to tenants in a safe and centralized way without changing their databases (personal copy, media, configurations, etc.).
Updates or new features in a Version are “saved” by creating a snapshot of the Version. To create a snapshot, deploy the version. After deploying the plugin, you can make it available to tenants by moving them to the new version.
So first, we must make sure you move your existing tenants from the ClassicPNN Version to the ModernmiB Version to make the new plugin available.
Activating new plugins #
However, moving existing tenants doesn’t make a new plugin automatically active. This wouldn’t be safe. You can activate one or more plugins simultaneously from the Version overview.
You can also automatically activate a plugin for new tenants (websites). Activating the plugin on the version will make it active for new tenants created using a Snapshot that includes this active plugin.
Setting the “Production Version” #
If you automatically provision new tenants using a Storefront (e.g., with our free plugin), this creates tenants on the production version. You can see which version is “production” by the green indicator. To set a version as production, open the Version and click “Set as Production”. This ensures new tenants use the new production version.
“Introducing plans and upsells” #
In our correspondence with the user that sparked this article, we were not immediately sure what the objective was that they were after. But seeing the Version names, we figured they wanted one version to represent a certain “Pro-tier” and the other to be “Not Pro-tier” in order to introduce plans and/or upsell.
If that’s the case (as it might be for you as you’re reading this), then it might be a better idea to use the role system, as the Storefront is incapable of creating Tenants on two different versions at the moment. The idea of versions is that they can be used as a safe tool to continue developing your product while not interfering with operational sites.
Your product should always be contained in one version. That is, all of the variants of your product should be contained in one version. Tenants can differ by turning plugins on/off manually through the WP admin menu, the Console, using Tenant Snapshots, or, in your case, the Role system of the WaaS-Client plugin.
One more tip: if changes don’t appear in a tenant, ensure you deploy the version by creating a snapshot.
If you’d like to discuss your personal use case, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us via the chat in the WPCS console.
You can start a free trial and experience the benefits of multi-tenant WordPress at WPCS.io.