Migrating from our legacy system to our new platform

If you've been with us from the beginning, you may notice some important differences in our new platform.

There are a few key terminology changes in the new platform to be aware of.

Magic Links

Magic Links apply only to templates in the new platform.

Magic links are equivalent to the "template duplication URL" in the legacy system

A magic link allows a template to be used to create a new sandbox.

Magic links don’t expire. Feel free to hard code these magic links in places where it makes sense for your use cases.

In addition, there is also one magic link that can be used to create a new, plain sandbox (not from any template). Usually, you'd create sandboxes from your template magic links, not this plain, boring, default sandbox — but hey, you be you, it's there if you need it.

Important: sandboxes in the new platform do not have magic links. Only templates.

Team Member Auto-Login Links

Inside the dashboard, you’ll notice that sandboxes have Auto-Login Links for team members. These Auto-Login Links allow team members to log into a sandbox.

These may look like the old one-click login links you used to see in your sandboxes, but they're not the same. These links are short-lived, so don’t hard code them anywhere. They expire. And they’re only for team members.

Templates

In the legacy platform, you made a template by simply copying the sandbox's magic creation link and using it. Once a new sandbox was made from any sandbox, the ancestor sandbox was considered to be a template. Both sandboxes continued on from there as normal sandboxes.

In the new platform, a template is just an archived copy of a sandbox.

When you create a template from a sandbox on the new platform, everything about the sandbox is copied into an archive. Everything is put into the archive: the database, all media, plugins, themes, settings, files in the directory, .htaccess modifications — everything.

That archive is saved in a secure location, and when its magic link is used, a copy of that archive is used as a pattern to create a new sandbox. Kind of like the clone stamp tool in Photoshop. Or a cookie cutter you might use in your kitchen at home.

If a template is similar to Ctrl/Cmd+C; using a template's magic link is like pressing Ctrl/Cmd+V.

It's important to note one key difference here, though... on the new platform, templates aren't active sandboxes. They're non-active archives of a sandbox. Think of them as a backup copy, stored offline on some external hard drive.

Here are key ways templates are different from sandboxes:

Templates aren't running updates in the background
Templates aren't running cron tasks
Templates aren't serving requests, so you can't link to their posts, pages, images, and files.
You can't log into a template
Templates don't have a URL of their own, and any sandbox you make from them will get a new address, unique from the sandbox the template was created from.

Deprecated Legacy Shortcodes

These shortcodes were allowed in previous versions of this product. These shortcodes are no longer supported, so do not use them. If migrating templates from the legacy system, be sure to remove these shortcodes. These each return an empty string.

[ShortCode]	Description
[tdr_password]	Displayed the initial password set for the default admin user account. No longer supported. Do not use. Returns an empty string.
[tdr_email_input]	Displayed a form field to allow entry of a new admin email address. No longer supported. Do not use. Returns an empty string.
[tdr_email_submit]	Showed a submit button to save the new admin email address entered in the form. No longer supported. Do not use. Returns an empty string.
[tdr_subscribe]	Showed a checkbox to allow subscription to the newsletter. No longer supported. Do not use. Returns an empty string.

Anonymous One-Click Login Link

In the legacy system, if one-click logins were enabled, there was a link inside the sandbox at the top of each screen. You could share that one-click login link and literally anyone could use it to access that sandbox (not to create a new sandbox, but to access the same sandbox you were looking at).

As of August 2022, the new platform DOES support a one-click anonymous login capability, but the setup works a little differently. Here's how to enable one-click logins.