Caution! Dupery! Without paying $100 its just a cloning tool.

  • The push from a staging to a productive environment is the most basic and elementary part of the concept. Without it is just a cloning tool and the word “staging” is not applicable.
    It is almost obvious to call it a trap, because the fact that this elementary function is behind the paywall is let’s say fogged. There are even links and pictures and buttons on the config page saying “Turorial: push changes to live website” and “Try out now”. That may not say but definitely suggest, that it is part of the free version.
    And the trick is to let people use the plugin to work on their staging page, spending a lot of effort, and when they want to push it to live, they surprisingly face the decision: doing all the work once again, or pay around $100 (ONE HUNDRED for a single website) to get it moved.
    I consider this as a dishonest and unfair business practice, I will not support it by paying any money and can only warn against using this plugin.

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  • Plugin Author Rene Hermenau

    (@renehermi)

    @marcusseiler Thanks for your review.

    > The push from a staging to a production environment is the most basic and elementary part of the concept. Without it is just a cloning tool and the word “staging” is not applicable.

    This is what other sources say:

    “A staging area, or landing zone, is an intermediate storage area used for data processing during the extract, transform and load (ETL) process. The data staging area sits between the data source(s) and the data target(s), which are often data warehouses, data marts, or other data repositories.[1]”

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staging_(data)

    “A staging environment is a copy of your production environment (your current live website) on a private server. This is a safe place that will allow you to test any changes – major or minor – that you plan on implementing in a secure environment, preventing any unexpected errors on your live website.”

    Source: https://www.commonplaces.com/blog/web-development-what-is-staging/

    As far as I know, it is nowhere said that the word staging must imply the migration process to be allowed to use it in conjunction with a staging environment.

    > There are even links and pictures and buttons on the config page saying “Turorial: push changes to live website”

    If you read that article you will see that it explains how to move your staging site to live without needing any extra tool nor paying for anything.

    Moving a staging site to its production website is a very complex process and if things go wrong I can not nor I want to take any responsibility by offering this migration feature as part of the free version. This is something which does not work for me. Even the free version of wp staging takes a lot of my time for developing and improving. It also needs much of support to make sure that it runs on as many hosts as possible.

    If this does not work for you and you do not want to support my work I understand it but it’s one thing to use a software and read it’s description what it can do and what not and on the other hand to use a software and do not read the description of it and later blame the developer of that plugin for not offering other expected functions.

    I am sorry to say but it’s your own responsibility to use a plugin and to check what this plugin can do for you before you use it. Especially if you are doing a hell of changes on a duplicate of your site.

    There is a lot of documentation what wp staging does and what it does not but you need to read on your own.

    Thread Starter marcusseiler

    (@marcusseiler)

    @renehermi Thanks for your quick response.
    And as well thanks for the definition quotes. I’m familiar with it.

    >If you read that article you will see that it explains how to move your staging site to live without needing any extra tool nor paying for anything.

    This is not the case. The tutorial describe how to use the pro version. In the third paragraph therein is another link to another tutorial and this one describes how to move staging to production without the pro version and frankly speaking: if I have to walk that path (incl. at least two other plugins and operating on DB level) I don’t need your plugin in the first place, because I can set up separate environments manually.

    To be clear, my main point is not that the feature is behind a paywall. It’s the fact that this is “far from obvious” to the user when he/she starts to use the tool. This creates the kind of “trap situation” as mentioned above, this is what makes it look like a scam to me and can only repeat my initial comment.

    From my point of view the plugin can deliver quite some benefit to the user and doesn’t need this kind of business practice. Simply make clear what’s in the free version and what’s not, instead of saying “It’s nowhere stated that the basic version …”.

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