No More Manual Updates

After we announced automatic updates for the free Theme 500 Framework, customers have been asking us when we’d do the same for IgnitionDeck and its extensions. This is something we’ve wanted to do since the beginning (we hate manual plugin updates as much as you do) but have been unable to do because of missing items in our infrastructure.

To do this properly, we needed several new APIs, including:

• A backend API to support the operation
• An API to generate license keys
• An API to validate license keys
• API to generate secure download links and send them through WordPress’ update API

In case you’re not aware, IgnitionDeck’s dashboard is managed by our MemberDeck plugin, a backend app that we built for delivering software downloads and the same app you receive with a purchase of IgnitionDeck + Membership and IgnitionDeck Enterprise.

It turns out that MemberDeck is also the perfect platform for hosting these additional APIs and the necessary infrastructure behind them, so for the past month, we’ve been working on them one at a time.

If you log out and back in to your dashboard, you should now see a new IgnitionDeck license key that you can enter in your IgnitionDeck settings. Going forward, this license key will be automatically validated by IgnitionDeck’s servers, and if an update is available, you’ll receive automatic notices for the duration of your license period. From there, you can update via your WordPress dashboard like you would with any other theme or plugin.

Better yet, most of these features have been rolled in to MemberDeck’s default functionality, meaning that if you want to use MemberDeck to generate and validate license keys of your own, it’s as easy as change a few additional settings in your level and download settings menus.

Obviously, we’re big believers in ‘dogfooding‘ our own products. We believe it helps us build better tools, and it ensures that if something breaks, it happens to us before it happens to you.

These new features are just a few in a long list of what is to come for IgnitionDeck, MemberDeck, and other products down the road. We’re eager to hear what you think. Comment away!