Showcase your product's flexibility the same way users will harness it, in the Customizer. All elegant and secure.
Allow your demo site visitors to easily access the Customizer without logging in. This way you can showcase your product’s customization experience as close to reality as possible.
Everything is setup in such a way that people who are up to no good can’t mess with your demo site data. We’ve put a lot of thought into this and we believe things are sound.
We know that each of us has their own design sensibilities and particular technical setup. That is why we’ve made it easy to integrate the plugin in a multitude of scenarios.
You can change both the frontend and the Customizer behavior of the plugin.
For the frontend, you have several options:
When it comes to the Customizer guest experience, the plugin will introduce a Back to Demo button (instead of the Publish button) and a notification for setting user expectations. You can customize the button text and the notification content and behavior.
Backstage should work with any type of Customizer options you have on your site:
The plugin is compatible with any type of WordPress installation:
The following limitations are inherent to the reality of having a sandboxed Customizer:
The main audience of this plugin are theme and plugin authors that wish to showcase to potential customers the awesome customization possibilities provided by their product.
Earn that extra confidence needed for your next sale by being fully open and letting your work speak for itself.
Made with love by Pixelgrade
You can translate Backstage on translate.wordpress.org.
If you identify any errors or have an idea for improving the plugin, please open an issue. We’re more than excited to see what the community thinks of this little plugin, and we welcome your input!
If Github is not your thing but you are passionate about Backstage and want to help us make it better, don’t hesitate to reach us.
Installing “Backstage” can be done either by searching for “Backstage” via the Plugins
screen in your WordPress dashboard, or by using the following steps: Add New
Plugins
screen in your WordPress dashboard. Add New UploadPlugins
menu in WordPress.Appearance
(or BackstageNetwork Settings
if network-wide activated) and set it up. BackstageWe believe so. To put our money where our mouth is, we use it in production on our own demo multisite installation.
We’ve strived to close off any endpoints that WordPress uses to save things (mainly the changeset logic specific to the Customizer experience).
There is no point in showcasing a customization experience that is not consistent with the real one. We couldn’t agree more. That is why we’ve studied the Customizer JavaScript logic and found ways to maintain the same results without saving anything in the database.
Sometimes, WordPress themes will come with custom JavaScript that will bind to click events and stop their propagation. Due to this, the Customizer (not our’s) logic can’t catch that click and go the proper way of refreshing the preview window. We really have not way around that.
The plugin doesn’t provide this functionality as it is quite difficult to map it to a set of configuration options. But it should be quite straight forward to code a function that “removes” panels, sections or controls when the special pseudo-guest user is logged in.
We are also developers (and designers, and marketers, and support people…) just like you. We know how important it is that plugins get coded in an open, thoughtful manner that is friendly towards those that have custom requirements.
The plugin provides actions and filters in all the right places allowing you to introduce custom logic just about anywhere, if the need arises.