Check whether a Benecaster add-on is available for a show

Free Intermediate

Use this when your code extends one of Benecaster’s add-ons — adding a section to the Analytics Dashboard’s digest, contributing rows to a Sponsor Manager export, reading transcripts the Transcription Service produced. You need to know whether that add-on is actually available on the show in front of you, so you can extend it when it is and stay out of the way when it is not.

⚠ This does not gate your own plugin. benecaster_addon_is_active() answers only about add-ons in Benecaster’s own catalogue — it compares against the entitlement list the licence server publishes, so a slug that is not one of theirs can never match and will always return false. If you sell your own plugin, license it your own way; use this to detect theirs.

The question has two halves, and one grant can give three answers. An add-on is available on a show when the licence grants it and the podcaster has left it switched on for that show. A Multi-Show customer can run the same add-on on shows A and B and switch it off for C. So code that resolves the question once and caches the answer gets show C wrong for the rest of the request.

The shape that follows: register unconditionally at boot, check at the point of use, where a show is actually in hand.

⚠⚠ Do not substitute benecaster_addon_is_active_for_any_show() for the per-show call to save a lookup. “Some show on this install has it” is not an answer to “may this show use it”. On a site running two shows on two different licences, that substitution shows one customer’s paid feature to another customer’s show.

The show context is a show post ID or the show’s _benecaster_show_uuid — both resolve identically, so pass whichever you already hold rather than looking the other one up.

Code

<?php
add_action( 'benecaster_boot', function ( \Benecaster\Container $container ): void {
    // Nothing here knows which show is being rendered yet, so this is the
    // one place the install-wide question is the right one: is it worth
    // wiring up at all on this install?
    if ( ! benecaster_addon_is_active_for_any_show( 'analytics-dashboard' ) ) {
        return;
    }

    $container->make( \MyPlugin\DigestSection::class )->register();
} );

// ...and check per show, where the show is known.
add_filter( 'benecaster_analytics_digest_sections', function ( array $sections, string $type, int $show_id, array $data ): array {
    if ( ! benecaster_addon_is_active( 'analytics-dashboard', $show_id ) ) {
        return $sections;
    }

    $sections[] = my_plugin_build_section( $show_id, $data );

    return $sections;
}, 10, 4 );

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Hooks Used

benecaster_boot