Plugin & theme marketplace

The marketplace is an optional, in-admin store for premium plugins and themes, served from tubepress.io. Free items install without an account; paid items are bought with credits and protected by a signed, domain-locked licence so they keep working on your site and only your site.

This page covers browsing, buying and licensing, installing, activating across multiple sites, updates, and how to list your own work.

The marketplace

You reach the marketplace from the admin — the Themes and Plugins screens pull live listings from tubepress.io. With an account connected you see the full catalogue including paid items and your purchases; without one, listings fall back to a public, free-items-only view so you can still browse and install free add-ons.

Browsing plugins & themes

Listings show each item's details and, for paid items, the credit price alongside your current balance, so you can see affordability at a glance. Plugins extend behaviour (see hooks & plugins); themes change the look (see themes). Some items offer tiers — pick the one that fits before you buy.

Buying & licensing

Buying a paid item spends credits from your balance. In return tubepress.io issues a licence token for the item: an Ed25519-signed record bound to your site's registrable domain.

The domain binding uses the registrable domain (eTLD+1), which has a practical upside: one licence for example.com automatically covers www.example.com, staging.example.com and any other sub-domain. A file-and-database clone served on a genuinely different domain, however, is detected. Because the token is signed, your install can prove the licence offline — when the serving host matches the token, no network call is needed.

Installing a purchased item

1. Buy it. Confirm the credit cost; the purchase is recorded against your account.
2. Download & install. From the admin, TubePress fetches the package straight from tubepress.io. Every package is verified by SHA-256 checksum and an Ed25519 signature before it is unpacked, so a tampered download is rejected.
3. Activate. Enable the plugin or switch to the theme as usual. Activation binds this site's domain to the licence (below).

Multi-site activation

A licence may permit a number of sites. Activating an item binds this site's domain to the licence; deactivating records the event but does not automatically free the slot, so a brief outage never costs you a binding.

Licences are re-validated in the background roughly every six hours by the runtime guard, keyed to the domain your site is actually served on. The design is deliberately fail-open:

• Free items, unknown items, and command-line runs are always allowed.
• Network or marketplace errors never disable anything — the last good state stands.
• Only a sustained wrong-domain or not-purchased verdict, past a grace window of about seven days, disables a paid item.
• An expired token is tolerated for roughly a further two weeks while it renews.

If a site lost its binding legitimately — say after a database migration — the guard rebinds it automatically into a free slot. When something does need attention, the admin shows a banner naming the item and its state (grace or blocked).

Updates for purchased items

TubePress checks tubepress.io for newer versions, reporting your installed plugin and theme versions so it can tell you what is out of date. Updates are delivered as the same checksummed, signed packages, so updating is as safe as the first install. Free items update through the public channel; paid items through your connected account.

Selling your own

You can build and sell your own add-ons. Develop against the documented APIs, package the result, then list it through your tubepress.io account — the marketplace handles signing, per-domain licensing and delivery for you.

• Building a plugin? Start with hooks & plugins and the theme API.
• Building a theme? See theme development.

Next steps