Licence and updates

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Activating

Go to Cart Presets → Settings. The Licence card is the first card on the screen. Paste the key from your purchase email into Licence key and click Activate. Once it’s active, the card shows the key with all but its last four characters hidden, and: The card’s buttons act straight away. They’re not part of the Settings save bar, so there’s nothing to save afterwards, and Discard won’t undo them.

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Who can change it

Only an administrator can activate, sync or deactivate the licence. The licence decides whether the site gets updates, and WordPress keeps plugin updates for administrators too. Anyone else who can open Settings, such as a Shop Manager, sees the card read-only: the status and the facts, with no key field and no buttons, and a note saying Only an administrator can change the licence. They don’t see the licence notice either, because its one link is to something they can’t do.

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A key with no account yet

A key you bought is already attached to your account. A key that was issued by hand might not be. Activating one of those needs a name and email to create the account, so the card asks first. A Create an account for this key? dialog shows the Name and Email that will be sent: the ones on your WordPress user. Nothing is sent until you click Create account and activate. Cancel sends nothing. You can change both details later in your account.

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What a licence buys

A licence buys updates and support. You don’t need one to keep running what you already have. Which version is on disk decides the tier, never licence state. An expired licence leaves every Pro file exactly where it was, so every Pro feature keeps working.

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What is sent, and when

Your licence key and site URL go to the licensing service: to activate, to check in periodically, and to look for updates. Your name and email go only when you confirm them for a key with no account yet. It runs from wp-admin and cron only. Your storefront never reaches it, so a customer browsing your shop never triggers a licence check. The key is never written to a log, never returned in an API response, and never shown in a notice. An update check sends it in a request header, not in the address, because addresses end up in server logs.

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Updates

With an active licence, Pro updates show up on your Plugins screen like any other plugin. Update in place. Your presets, items and settings are database rows, and the swap doesn’t touch them. WordPress checks for updates on its own schedule: roughly twice a day, and more often while you’re sitting on the Updates screen.

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The licence notice

Without an active licence, WordPress shows a dismissible warning across wp-admin, including the CartPresets list and editor. It’s a standard WordPress admin notice, and it has a Manage licence link that opens Settings at the Licence card. You won’t see it on Settings itself, where the card already tells you the same thing. Dismissing it is per user, and it stays dismissed for that licence state. If the state changes, say an expiry or a detached site, the notice comes back once, because it’s telling you something new. It goes away by itself once the licence is active. Each version of the notice says what stopped and what didn’t. When a licence lapses, almost nothing changes.

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Licence states

The card’s badge shows which state you’re in. In all four, every Pro feature keeps working.

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Moving a site

Staging and production count as separate activations. If you’ve run out: If the old site is already gone and still holding an activation, contact support. We can release it from our side.

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For developers

cartpresets_update_manifest_url changes where a site looks for its release manifest. Point it elsewhere to run a pre-release channel, or return an empty string to switch automatic updates off for that site entirely. The licence is checked before the manifest is fetched, so the filter changes which release a licensed site is offered. It doesn’t bypass licensing. See the hooks reference.