The folks behind Ninja Forms are working on a new plugin, called Demo WP Pro. Demo WP Pro is pretty meta, as it’s intended for people that sell WordPress related products.
The plugin allows you to create demo sites available for users to test-drive a theme, plugin, or anything else — in a safe, but real WordPress environment.
It works using Multisite, so that each demo user would be spinning up their own site within Multisite. Also, since it’s a Multisite, a site admin is not a network admin, so site admins can’t do everything a normal admin would, which helps protect the site and server from exploitations. Additionally, they also have methods for blocking admins from any hosting specific admin utilities.
They have an updated demo video on the way to showcase all of the features, but here are a couple of features for Demo WP Pro:
- You can set specific roles for users
- Since it’s multisite, each user has their own site and won’t share demo sites with other testers
- Changes to the default demo will be used for each new Multisite instance
- You can set timeframes for automatically cleaning up and removing demo sites
I had a brief call with James Laws and Kevin Stover, and they said that they hope to open up a private beta in the next couple of days. So if this is something that interests you, you may want to get in touch with them about a beta.
Within a few weeks from the private beta, they hope to launch to the public. They don’t have a specific price point locked down right now, but I understand it will be plenty affordable for your average WordPress product business, especially considering the value-add that it offers.
Interestingly, they are even considering functionality for the demos that you may not initially think about for an admin demo plugin. They smartly recognized these sample demos as a potentially great place to do admin A/B testing, so they are considering that and other functionality for later iterations of the plugin.
You can subscribe to updates about the plugin’s release on the Demo WP Pro website.
I’ve been working on a dashboard demo plugin myself recently because I couldn’t find anything like it already available. What I’ve built so far is much more simple than this one, but will also enable a similar kind of demo for any plugin. Stoked that I’m not the only one who’s been tackling this 🙂
Maybe this could work in conjunction with affiliate links/cookie setting. That way people who try the demo and go on to buy result in a commission. This could even work as a standalone thing, where you offer a service where users can try any WordPress product (or a combination) on a demo site.
This is very cool! We just wrestled with this exact problem at my shop. We released a page builder plugin, and really wanted people to instantly be able to take it for a test drive. It took a lot of doing, but we setup a demo site that generates a sandbox for each user to toy around in. If you’re curious, here is our demo:
http://demo.fastlinemedia.com/
A tool to automate the processes of generating these demo sites would be invaluable! I can’t wait to see more!
This is going to be great for WordPress consumers, too. I always get frustrated that I have to ask the author if a theme or plugin will meet my specifics needs before buying it, it would be great if I could take it for a test run.