Activating Znode Storefront

This topic provides you with an overview of the Znode Storefront licensing and activation process. It is extremely important for you to understand this process in order to keep your storefront compliant with the Znode licensing requirements.

What does Activation mean?

There are several license options for Znode Storefront but the typical licensing is Domain based. Domain based licensing means that your storefront license is only valid for one URL. In production this URL must be a fully qualified path. In other words www.MyStore.com, www.MyStore.com/store and test.MyStore.com are all considered different URLs that require separate licenses and hence need to be activated separately.

When do I need to activate?

When running your storefront from within Visual Studio or accessing the site from http://localhost you do not need to activate your software. This mode allows you to do all your development and local testing without any restrictions.

As soon as you need to access your site from a URL other than http://localhost (or it’s variations such as http://localhost/store) you will need to activate the software. For instance accessing your site from http://test.MyStore.com or http://www.MyStore.com will prompt you to activate.

How many times can I activate?

The number of times a license can be activated is dependent on the Edition that you purchased. The Professional Edition for instance is restricted to one activation. This means that you can develop locally on your own machine using http://localhost and you can activate your site on your final production server (http://www.MyStore.com).

Other licenses will allow you to activate multiple times which allows you to install on test servers so that other people can have access to your site during development. For instance if you have two activations for a license then you can activate once to http://test.MyStore.com and once to http://www.MyStore.com. Because the number of activations is limited we strongly suggest that you do not activate to an IP address but set up a domain name that can be reused if even if the IP address changes.

Previous versions of Znode Storefront may have used a sub domain method of activating test servers. In other words http://test.MyStore.com and http://www.MyStore.com would work with one activation but http://www.MyStore2.com would require a separate activation. This caused some confusion and in version 5.1 and above we have gone to the more strait forward method of activation described above.