Congrats on grabbing your copy of SleekAnnounce, hands down the best Banners for WordPress if we say so ourselves! Let’s dig right in and install the plugin, which is the exact same process as any other WordPress plugin:

1. Download your copy of SleekAnnounce form your account area. 

***Important: Many operating systems will automatically unzip this file. However you will be uploading this exact .zip file so it needs to remain zipped. If your OS unzips files automatically, you will need to compress the file into a .zip in order to proceed.

2. In your website’s WordPress admin area, navigate to the Plugins tab. There, you will see a button titled “Add New” at the top of the page. Click this button, and then click “Upload Plugin” button found in the same location. Finally, select the plugin file from your computer by clicking the “Choose File” button, which will allow you to locate your .zip plugin file from your computer.

3. After selecting the correct file, you will then click “Upload”. After the upload is compelte, click the “Activate Plugin” button, and you’re done!

On completing the above steps, the plugin has now been correctly installed. However before it will become funcitonal, you’ll need activate the API key assigned to you based on the license you chose when making the purcahse. Activating your API Key is covered in the next section of this documentation.

Each Brindle plugin must be activated via a unique API key, which is automatically assigned to your products. Luckily it is an ultra-quick process that only takes a few moments to complete, so let’s dig in:

1. In your account area you will notice a seciton titled “API KEYS” in the left-hand sidebar. Go ahead an click that link to see a list of your APIs, each categorized by their corresponding product. Locate the correct API, and copy it to your clipboard for later use.

2. Now armed with the power of a copied API Key, return to WP-ADMIN. If you completed the installation of a Brindle plugin, you will notice that a new tab has been added to your sidebar, cleverly titled “My Brindle”. Hover your cursor over that tab and you’ll see a sub-section titled “API Activation”, which you’ll want to click.

3. On this screen you’ll see the field where you’ll want to paste the API Key that you copied form your account area, and select “Activate”.

4. JK there is no 4th step, you’re done! If succesfully activated, you will see the status changed to “ACTIVATED: alongside the number of active and remaining uses of the key.

Important Notes on API Key Activation:

• There is a glitch that sometimes causes the plugin to be set to inactive by default. This setting is in the “Deactive API Key” tab. You may need to navigate to this tab ans ensure the “Deactivate API Key” checkbox is NOT selected. Then, click “update” and try activating the API Key again on the other tab.
• The most common cause for API activation to not work is site caching. Site caching can cause your site to not communicate with our API validation server. Be sure to disable caching temporarily until you succesfully activate your plugins. Note this can also be cause by third party “optimization” services such as Cloudflare.