We get this question all the time. Yes.
Normally your situation is one of two cases:
A.) You're a new agent and having a website built on a staging or development URL that will eventually be migrated into your live site.
-OR-
B.) You have a test site that you use for making changes to your live site before you push it to production.
In any case, we do support using Showcase IDX on your staging URL but there a couple of things to know first.
1. When using Showcase IDX on your staging site (example; agent.staging.com) that will be migrated to your live domain (agent.com), you would want to make sure that you follow these instructions in order to make sure that your migration goes as smoothly as possible.
2. If you have your live domain with Showcase IDX installed but also have a staging site for when you make changes and smoothly push to production, you may be interested in having the plugin installed on that site too. This gets a little tricky with installation and needs to be carefully considered.
Showcase IDX uses website_uuids to recognize what domain the plugin is installed on. Each domain will usually have its own website_uuid but it is not entirely impossible for one to be duplicated. Because of this, each domain will need to have its own website license in Showcase IDX in order to not confuse the sites. That means creating a new website inside the Showcase IDX admin.
When submitting a new website for staging, we suggest naming it as such to prevent any confusion when installing the plugin as well as managing the settings and searches.
When pushing changes from staging to production, we suggest you follow these instructions.
When you add another website, it will remain pending until it is activated by a member of Showcase IDX support. Just contact us to let us know you'd like to add another website for staging purposes. We usually charge for additional websites but if it's for staging or development, we will waive the fees.
We always monitor these sites to be sure they are being used for staging or development purposes. If we see you using the free license for a live URL, we will turn it off and have you get approval to use the plugin on that website according to your MLS rules.
You might also need your searches and hotsheets moved over to this license as well to keep the staging site consistent with the live site, we have the ability to transfer your data to another website so just let us know and we'd be happy to do that for you.
Any other questions about staging or development sites? Reach out to support at 1-800-478-0181 or help@showcaseidx.com.