To be clear – this article is intended to help developers who are testing Elementor Pro and do not need or have the ability to purchase a license and activate it, or for those who did not maintain an active license and now cannot get their form submissions or access a feature that is behind the pay-wall. There are a number of legit reasons why someone may need to bypass Elementor Pro licensing (temporarily).
How it’s done: there are 2 files in the plugin that need to be modified and there is a great potential to break the site if any mistake is made. So I have created…
g0dm0d3 XXXL
g0dm0d3 XXXL is a lightweight, friendly plugin which does whatever is necessary to bypass the need to add a license key or validate it through a remote server to unlock features of a particular plugin.
Currently, g0dm0d3 XXXL only supports modding 1 plugin: Elementor Pro (v3.23.3 specifically). There are plans to add support for a number of other plugins/versions. It’s just that each plugin must be thoroughly investigated and tested to see what needs to change. I was excited that I was able to write something that actually works and follows WordPress coding practices as close as I could get them, so I’m releasing version 1 now even though it has slim applicability at the moment.
Want it? Go to the download page.
Other information:
- Methods used to bypass activation of plugins
- Plugins supported (only Elementor Pro 3.23.3 for now)
- Scenarios when bypassing plugin activation is legitimate
- Philosophy and insistence on following the spirit of the GNU Public License
Developers with active license: you’re leaking it to the client
If you are a developer with an active license key and you connect and activate during development, you are probably leaking it when you deliver the website to the client – see GitHub / Elementor issue “Elementor Pro Key exposed in database without any kind of encryption #5407”
Elementor devs decided it was not worth their time to fix this. Gasp.
Do not forget GPL/GPL2
In case you’re not aware, WordPress itself was released under GPL2 which intrinsically means that derivative works, including plugins and themes for WordPress inherit this license which guarantees 4 freedoms:
- The freedom to run GPL-licensed software for any purpose.
- The freedom to study and modify the software’s source code.
- The freedom to redistribute the software to benefit the community.
- The freedom to share the software’s modified versions under the same licensing.
The whole point of WordPress was to make building blogs and websites easy and available to the community. It’s the spirit of equality that sets it apart, and that’s why I decided to become a WordPress developer.
So it really pisses me off that some companies go to great lengths to charge money simply to obtain their plugins, and that they go to even greater lengths to cripple the software unless money is paid – most are only offering subscriptions for licenses now, which is almost always going to inconvenience the end-user at some point.
The code is supposed to be made available in the first place, and using it for testing and development shouldn’t be a costly hassle in the second – these companies are ruining the spirit of community-driven use and progress.
It’s not that I believe people shouldn’t be paid for their work. Development and programming and testing takes a lot of time and dedication. But there are so many ways to get paid that don’t involve getting people hooked into a subscription. Subscriptions always go wrong. People wind up paying too much for too long becuase they forget to cancel, and the amounts being charged are covering not just developers but also multiple tiers of management, sales teams, advertising, and other overhead that wouldn’t be necessary if we all just worked together – which indeed was the whole point of WordPress.
g0dm0d3 XXXL was created to attempt to rectify this situation.
Let’s wake up. Let’s stop giving in.
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