You have two tabs open that look identical. You make the change, you hit update, and only then do you glance at the address bar. Was that staging, or was that the live site?<\/p>\n\n
StageBar answers that question before you start typing, not after. The WordPress admin bar changes colour and shows a badge, so where you are is the first thing you see on every screen:<\/p>\n\n
Activate it and it works. There is nothing you have to configure first.<\/p>\n\n
When it is not sure, it says LIVE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n This is the idea the whole plugin is built around, and it is worth a minute of your time.<\/p>\n\n Telling you a staging site is LIVE is a nuisance. Telling you a live site is STAGING is the exact accident the plugin exists to prevent, because you would trust it and start making changes. So when it is not certain, it says LIVE.<\/p>\n\n That principle shows up in real decisions:<\/p>\n\n So if it says LIVE, treat it as live. If it says anything else, something specific told it so - and the settings screen will tell you exactly what.<\/p>\n\n When you need to correct it<\/strong><\/p>\n\n Some staging sites do not look like staging sites from the outside. When that happens, go to Settings \u2192 StageBar<\/strong> and tell it about the site. Type an address, press Enter, and it becomes a tag you can remove again with a click.<\/p>\n\n You can be as broad or as precise as you like:<\/p>\n\n The first list, Live<\/strong>, is there for the rarer case of a real site being labelled wrongly. Put that site's full address in it and no other entry can override it.<\/p>\n\n If two of your entries could both apply to a site, the more exact one wins - a full address beats a domain, and a domain beats a single word - so being specific always does what you expect. The screen points out overlaps as you add them.<\/p>\n\n The settings screen explains itself<\/strong><\/p>\n\n At the top it tells you which environment the site is on, the exact address it checked, and why<\/em> it decided that - your own list, a built-in rule, or a setting in You can also choose a colour for each environment, from five suggested shades or any hex value you like. The text colour is worked out from the background for you, so a badge can never end up unreadable. Each badge preview updates as you pick, and if you change the colour for the environment this site is currently in, the real admin bar at the top of the page updates with it - before you save anything.<\/p>\n\n What it does not do<\/strong><\/p>\n\n Just as important as what it does:<\/p>\n\n The most reliable setup, if you have access<\/strong><\/p>\n\n Everything above is the plugin working out the answer for itself. If you can edit This is a standard WordPress setting, not something this plugin invented, and other plugins understand it too. When it is set, StageBar uses it and ignores everything else.<\/p>\n\n For developers<\/strong><\/p>\n\n Order of precedence: \n
dev-shop.com.au<\/code> or stage-lighting.com.au<\/code> is shown as LIVE, because \"dev\" and \"stage\" there are part of a company name, not a signal.<\/li>\nstaging<\/code> or dev<\/code> part.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n
staging.example.com<\/code> matches that one site.<\/li>\nexample.com<\/code> matches it and everything underneath it.<\/li>\nuat<\/code> matches any address using it as a name of its own, like uat.example.com<\/code>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\nwp-config.php<\/code>. No guessing about what the plugin is thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n
wp-config.php<\/code>, you can simply tell WordPress the answer instead, and there is nothing left to guess:<\/p>\n\ndefine( 'WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE', 'staging' );\n<\/code><\/pre>\n\nWP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE<\/code>, then your saved addresses, then the built-in rules, then production. Filters run last and override all of it.<\/p>\n\n\n
stagebar_environment<\/code> - override the resolved environment (local<\/code>, development<\/code>, staging<\/code>, production<\/code>). Any other value is ignored and treated as production<\/code>.<\/li>\nstagebar_hostname_rules<\/code> - add or change the built-in hostname patterns. An array of environment => array of PCRE patterns<\/code>; unknown keys and non-string patterns are ignored.<\/li>\nstagebar_style<\/code> - change the label or colours for an environment. Colours must be 3 or 6 digit hex strings including the leading #<\/code>; anything else falls back to the resolved default.<\/li>\nstagebar_colour_admin_bar<\/code> - return false<\/code> to keep the default admin bar colour and show only the badge.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n