Before buying a license question

• Shmoo

• January 22, 2015 at 1:38 am

Hello there,

Just a small intro:

I don’t call myself a developer but I have been creating WordPress sites for a long time (ever since WP 2.3) so I know a lot about it and can do a lot customizing wise to WordPress.
Everything I create I do offline/locally and 98% of all the content that I create never goes public because it’s just a hobby of mine and I would like to keep it like that. From time to time I do create a website for friends or other close people I know in my community – never charge real money like developers can do but just a small fee so I can buy software to improve my workflow.

In the past I’ve always worked with the Reusable Custom Meta Boxes code-snippet by Tammy at Github to create my Custom Fields and Meta Boxes inside Custom Post Types. It works great but it’s still lots of copy/pasting and writing lots of lines of codes at every single project. It’s too static in my opinion.
Yesterday I found ACF on WordPress.org, I knew this plugin was around for years but always thought this plugin was made for WP beginners that can’t write/understand a single line of PHP. After testing it yesterday, I found out this isn’t correct at all, even Pro developers can use ACF just to speed up their workflow.

I really like what I’ve seen from testing the Free ACF plugin yesterday so today I was really excited and started to dig more into the Pro version – Yes I’ve been a bit naughty and downloaded an out of date Pro version of the internet just to see how things work when upgrading from Free to Pro. I don’t wanna be a pirate, but I just like to be 100% sure before I buy stuff like digital content (code) that you can’t give back to the owner after you bought it and it’s not fully what you’d wished for.

My few question:

1)
Free version is still on v.4.x while the Pro version is already at v.5.x – will the Free version also get upgraded to 5 in the future just to pull them together or will they always be different?

2)
I noticed in the Pro version the UI and the elements have changed. To be honest I don’t like the V.5 UI. When using the Free version and setting setup a Relation field to search data inside a Post Type or Taxonomy the search-UI is pretty and very clear what it will do. Even while adding settings, holding down the CMD-key will let you select multiple Post Types where this field can search in while in V.5 it works like adding Tags to Facebook or any other tagger-script, you can only add a single Post Type at a time. Not very user friendly.

3)
If I buy the Pro version how does it work with my license key validation? I don’t really have a domain name that can verify for future updates because I work locally.

4)
Will there ever be coupon codes for any discount?
I’ve Googled and it looks like there has never been any codes for discounts.
This is bad, now it looks like I don’t wanna pay anything for solid code but that’s not true it’s just that I create maybe 10 sites a year locally as a hobby and self education and if I have to buy a developer license version because I can only use it on a single WP site then 99.- is a lot of money for only offline/locale usage and not making any money of it myself. If someone is a Pro developer and sells his themes multiple times at ThemeForrest I can understand that 99.- is not a lot of money for this plugin but that’s not what I do.

Thanks,

• James

• June 18, 2015 at 9:12 pm

Hi @shmoo

Thank you for raising your concerns.

1). No the Pro version and and ACF 4 will always remain different since there was a major shift in the pro version to integrate all the individual add ons into one package unlike in version 4 where you have to buy each add on individually.

2). Thank you for the feedback on this field I believe there is some room for improvement and we will take your suggestions into consideration. There is however an option to select multiple items.

3). You can also verify the key on the local instance if you connected to the internet.

4). We offer discounts to any customer who had purchased any of the verion 4 premium add ons. These customers are eligible to the free version of ACF5.