For the past several years Kernl has been trusted with securing access to many people’s hard work via our license management system. We recently re-imagined our entire WordPress license management system, so we want to introduce it to you.
WordPress License Management
If you’ve ever sold a plugin or theme out on the open market, worrying about your plugin getting pirated is often at the top of your mind. One way to mitigate some of that risk is to use a license management solution. Kernl’s new license management system allows you to restrict access to your plugin or theme by forcing customers to activate before functionality is enabled. We can also check license codes before updates to your plugin or theme are downloaded, allowing you to restrict how many free upgrades a customer receives.
To summarize:
- Kernl allows you to manage license keys for your product.
- Kernl will restrict the number of updates a license is allowed to download for your product.
- Kernl has a REST API that can allow you to restrict usage of your plugin until a license has been activated.
License Management Example
So how might you use Kernl’s WordPress license management? An example will illustrate this best.
The example above has a function to validate if a user’s license is valid. This can be used anywhere in your code to expose functionality only if the Kernl license is valid.
Restricting Update Downloads with WordPress License Management
If you would like to simply prevent your customers from downloading updates to your plugin or theme for free, just add the license parameter when you instantiate the Kernl update check class. This works the same for both plugins and themes.
The only difference between the sample above and a normal Kernl update instantiation is the inclusion of the ‘license’ property, which tells which license to try and validate with.
Going Forward
Want to give Kernl WordPress license management a try? Check out https://kernl.us and sign up. It’s free for 30 days and doesn’t require a credit card! In addition to license management and updates, we also have some great features like WordPress continuous deployment and feature flags.