If I purchase the CMS 2.0 Studio version to use on my website, I understand that the license covers me for that website domain and any sub-domains for that website.
Does the CMS 2.0 Studio license also allow me to deploy the CMS to my ServBay testing system on my development Mac? The domain name for that will typically be different (although internal to my Mac).
I normally do my Elements testing by deploying to ServBay and then once I am happy, publish the update to the production system that is externally hosted.
Testing the CMS Online Editor on a local development setup like ServBay isn’t something we support, and I’d recommend against relying on it.
The reason: the Online Editor isn’t part of the static site that Elements exports. It’s a separate application that runs on your server, and it leans heavily on the server environment around it such as PHP version and extensions, file and folder permissions, write access, and so on. Local stacks like ServBay (or MAMP, Valet, etc.) configure all of that differently from a typical live host, so a clean test on ServBay wouldn’t actually guarantee the CMS behaves the same way on your production server. A failure there wouldn’t necessarily point to a real problem either.
For your workflow, the better approach is to test on a staging subdomain of your live site, e.g. staging.yourdomain.com. As you noted, the Studio license covers your domain and its sub-domains, so you’re fully covered, and you’re testing in an environment that genuinely matches production.
What I am trying to understand is if there is anything in how the license for Studio is implemented that would prevent me from using it on ServBay as a pre-staging system (even if not recommended)?
As you’re running it in a local environment, I’m not sure the online check for the domain would work… You can give it ago and find out, it might work, but it might not. Either way this is not something we support right now.
