Product Updates

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Product Updates Documenation Pee Aye Creative
How to update the Divi Events Calendar Module plugin
Successfully updated the Divi Events Calendar Module plugin

Manual Plugin Updates

Keep in mind that the most up-to-date version of any product will always be in your Account downloads area. So if for any reason you do not see the update in your website dashboard, even after it was announced, please go to your account and download the file and upload it to your site.

How To Install A Plugin Manually

Sometimes we get asked if installing the plugin manually will affect any settings. The answer is no! Installing a plugin manually by overriding the existing one is actually the same technical process as WordPress uses to create an update – it simply replaces the old file with the new file. You can check our tutorial to learn how to replace a plugin file manually.

How To Manually Replace A WordPress Theme Or Plugin File Tutorial by Pee Aye Creative

Testing Updates On Staging Site

Our team works very hard on all products to deliver the best experience to our customers and to continually provide new features and improvements to our plugins. Because of all the billions of possible combinations of Divi with other plugins, custom code, and servers, it is impossible for us to test every scenario or guarantee there will be no issues.

This is why staging sites are so great to use regularly. They are perfect for testing plugin updates when you want to make sure everything works fine on your setup before updating the plugin on your live site. Installing updates on your staging site first allows you to test to see everything works and looks good. Then, once you are ready, you can merge the changes into the live site or be more confident to run the update directly on the live site.

When To Use A Staging Site For Our Plugin Updates?

You don’t need to use a staging site for every little update, but we do recommend it for major updates with the main version number changes. At Pee-Aye Creative, we use a standard system for this with three numbers like x.x.x.

The first number means it is a major change to the core plugin, so please always use a staging site for those.

The second number means there are some big new features, so it is highly recommended to use a staging site to test those updates.

The third number means the update is much smaller and focussed on fixes and minor improvements, so a staging site test is probably not needed.

How To Use A Staging Site?

Testing major updates on a staging site is very important, and yet so often a staging site is only considered after it is too late. Don’t let this be your story! On our blog, we have a full tutorial and video explaining what a staging site is and how to set one up and use it for your Divi website.

How To Create And Use A Divi Staging Site Tutorial by Pee Aye Creative

Creating Backups

Backups should be a very regular part of every website, with automatic backups at least every day for 14 days or more. But manual backups are also helpful to take just before making a big change on your site, such as when updating a plugin with a major update. This is especially important if you are not using a staging site to test updates. We recommend making a backup before any plugin update with the first or second number change, as described in the section above about staging. 

How To Make A Backup

If you are new to backups, you can learn more about them by checking the tutorial and video on our blog. This will explain why they are so important and how to create them with your host or manually.

How To Create A Backup Of Your Divi Website Tutorial By Pee Aye Creative

How To Get Child Theme Updates

Due to the nature of child themes and layout packs, updates to your existing site would not only be difficult, but would also affect your styling and layouts. From time to time, we update our child themes and layout packs to keep up with new Divi features or to fix minor issues. Existing customers have access to download and install the current versions of any product at any time from your account downloads area.

NOTE: You should not update a child theme without first creating a backup of the site or a backup of any code changes you have made. For example, if you have already changed the hex colors of a child theme in the style.css file, updating would revert to the original. So please be careful with that!

Troubleshooting

The following errors can sometimes happen when you try to update the plugin to a new version.

The Update Isn’t Appearing

You should be able to update the plugin via the main Updates page in the WordPress Dashboard. If you’re sure that a new version of the plugin is available but it’s not appearing for you to install, please check the following:

Is your license key active? If you have changed domain names (e.g. if you’ve moved from a development site to your live domain), go to the plugin settings page and re-save your license key to activate it on the live domain.

Has the update only just been released? If the new version of the plugin was released very recently, then it may not be available for you to install yet due to the system only checking for updates periodically. It can sometimes take a while for updates to become available on all sites. Please check back later to see if the update is appearing for you.

Has your subscription expired? If your product subscription has expired or been cancelled it, the license keys will deactivate, and the updates will not work. In this case, you will need to log into your Account and go to the “Subscriptions” tab and click on the “Resubscribe” button to re-purchase the plugin to get a new license key before you can update.

Automatic update is unavailable for this plugin.

You may encounter a message like this in our plugin list:

There is a new version of [Product Name] available. View version [#] details. Automatic update is unavailable for this plugin.

This message can be very confusing because of how WordPress presents it. It could mean a variety of things, and there is not one specific reason that we know about for this kind of issue.

It could mean there is an issue with the license key that is added in the settings. It usually means the license key is not active on your current domain. It may show as active in your Settings>[Product Name] but in your Account it is not showing. This normally happens if you have moved to a different domain since you first activated the license key. For example, perhaps you started using the plugin on a staging site and have since moved to your live domain name.

The update is not available because the site is not properly connected to your account. You can only update the plugin if you have an active license key.

To fix the problem, simply go to Setting>[Product Name] in your WordPress admin area and deactivate the license key. Now, just add the key again and it should work. Once the license is active on the correct domain, you will be able to update the plugin from the WordPress Dashboard as expected.

Last updated March 8, 2024
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