@Jack Sellwood: Why is the Local product lineup so confusing? LBF is now gone, and we have Local Lightning - for which the application is actually called just "Local." Then we have Local Pro, which is even more confusing on what you get with that paid-for app, and now we have Live Links PRO. So, by the "Pro" moniker, can we assume that is a paid-for addition to one or both of either Local Lightning or Local Pro? And why isn't Local Pro included with long-time paid hosting (I've been with Flywheel for 6 years)?
@Jeff Safire: Hi Jeff, thanks so much for the feedback. We tried to make this clear, and it sounds like we weren't totally successful that that!
Lightning is a major version name like macOS "Catalina". Lightning represented Local v5, and since we're already at Local v5.6, you'll see us use the Lightning moniker less and go back to version numbers. We wanted something to signify such a significant rebuild to Local, and at the time, we thought branding the version with a name would help differentiate major Local versions.
Local has been a completely free product for 4 years now, and there were some features we wanted to build that we couldn't justify offering for free. For example, Live Links Pro requires we manage an entire fleet of public cloud infrastructure and build a web app to power everything. You may see over time certain features trickle down to the free version of Local as we prove them out and figure out how to offer them at a lower cost. For example, we'll be unlocking staging push/pull for all Flywheel customers next month.
Finally, we've wanted to drop "by Flywheel" and simplify our branding and application name for a while now. When we added support for WP Engine sites to Local Connect, we finally made the shift since Local supported multiple hosts.
Hope that helps!
@Jack Sellwood: Thanks for the reply, Jack. I've always thought the staging push/pull feature should have been free for Flywheel hosting accounts. And, I am still not clear if Live Links Pro can be added to either of Local Lightning or Local Pro, or does it require Pro? Did I miss that somewhere?
@Jeff Safire: great question! Live Links Pro is a feature of Local Pro: https://localwp.com/pricing/
In Local 5.6, we shipped a new service, Live Links Pro, as an alternative to ngrok. Live Links Pro offer durable, persistent URLs so you can share your Local Site with your whole team. This is a homegrown service, from the Local team, and offers higher connection limits, security by default, and improved reliability.