Understand the Free and Pro relationship
Drecha Events & Bookings Pro is an extension of the required Free plugin. Free owns the shared activities, locations, teachers, bookings, appointments, customer accounts, settings, shortcodes, and public endpoints. Pro adds its editors and premium workflows to those same records; it does not create a second event library.
Keep Drecha Events & Bookings Free installed and active even when you temporarily stop using Pro.
Recognize inactive Pro access
When the Pro plugin is installed but its trial or license is not valid, an Administrator sees a notice explaining that Events & Bookings remains available and that existing Pro data is safe. The notice links to the License screen.
WordPress administration notice explaining that Pro access is inactive and existing Pro data is safe
Screenshot will be added here.
The same state can happen after manually deactivating a license, after a trial ends, or when Pro has no valid license key. A temporary validation outage is handled differently: a recently validated paid license can continue from its cached status for up to seven days. Trial access does not use that paid-license grace period.
Know what remains available
The following Free functionality continues without active Pro access:
- One-time events, classes, and sessions.
- Reusable locations, teachers, and categories.
- Public calendars, core shortcodes, and the Gutenberg block.
- Event bookings, attendees, capacity, statuses, confirmation and cancellation email, and secure customer cancellation.
- Customer accounts, booking history, privacy export, and erasure tools.
- Core appointment services, weekly business hours, unavailable dates, slot generation, reservations, and cancellation.
Pro does not delete stored premium data when access ends. Recurrence rules and exceptions, custom-field definitions and values, styling, passes, memberships, waitlists, automation records, and advanced appointment allocations remain in the database.
Understand what becomes read-only or unavailable
An inactive Pro add-on stops premium creation and mutation rather than pretending those actions succeeded. Examples include changing a recurring schedule, creating or changing passes and memberships, generating new waitlist offers, running advanced report exports, and editing other Pro settings.
A recurring activity remains stored and visible. In the Free activity editor it shows a Pro notice. Free deliberately refuses to save that recurring record, because saving its one-time editor over the record could destroy the recurrence configuration. Reactivate Pro before changing its title, content, timing, recurrence, or exceptions.
Without the licensed Pro recurrence runtime, Free does not expand a stored series into all generated occurrences. Do not rely on the Free calendar as a complete recurrence preview while Pro is inactive.
Restore Pro access
- Confirm that Drecha Events & Bookings Free is active under Plugins.
- Activate Drecha Events & Bookings Pro if the add-on itself is disabled.
- Open Events & Bookings > License as an Administrator.
- Enter the license key and select Activate license, or use the available trial action when appropriate.
- Open a recurring activity and confirm that Schedule type, Recurrence, Skip dates, and Move a date are available.
- Review Pro operational screens before making changes. Existing records should reappear without import or conversion.
Deactivating and reactivating Pro does not require rebuilding Free events or exporting and importing them.
Free and Pro differences
Free remains useful without a Drecha account or license and has no event or booking quota. Pro access is required to create or change premium configuration and to run premium processes. This boundary protects premium actions while preserving shared customer data and ordinary Free workflows.
The Pro purchase is a one-time lifetime-use license for one production website. It is not an annual subscription. License validation controls Pro access and protected updates; it does not make ordinary Free bookings depend on Drecha's servers.
Troubleshoot inactive access
The License screen says Pro is inactive after entering a key
Confirm that the key belongs to Drecha Events & Bookings Pro, the site URL is the intended licensed website, and WordPress can make outbound HTTPS requests to drecha.com. Copy the exact response shown by the License screen when contacting support.
A recurring activity will not save in Free
This is intentional downgrade protection. Restore Pro access before editing that record. Do not recreate it as a one-time activity unless you deliberately want a separate record.
Free menus or booking tools disappeared
Confirm that the Free core is still installed and active. Pro declares Free as a required plugin and is not a replacement for it.
The license service is temporarily unreachable
Do not remove or recreate content. A recently validated paid license may use its cached valid state for up to seven days. If access is inactive after that period, Free continues operating and the stored Pro data remains intact until validation succeeds again.
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