Live and Test view
Every admin screen that shows a number or a list answers one question first: live money, or test money? The view mode is how you choose. It sits in the admin bar, it applies everywhere at once, and the two sides never mix.
Live view shows live campaigns, live pledges and live totals. Test view shows test campaigns and their pledges. There is no combined view — a figure covering both would be true of no real population, and would quietly overstate your revenue.
Only users who can edit other people’s campaigns see the toggle. Creators, backers and visitors never see it, and it never affects a public page.
Switching views
Section titled “Switching views”At the far right of the admin bar, just before your account menu, is a small Live view indicator. Click it and pick Test view.
The whole admin bar turns teal, so you can tell at a glance which side you’re looking at without hunting for the label. Under the two choices, a line reads “Applies to this site only” — on a WordPress network, switching one site’s view leaves every other site alone.
Switch back the same way.
The mode travels in the link
Section titled “The mode travels in the link”The view mode rides in the page address. Copy a link out of Test view, send it to a colleague who also has the capability, and it opens in Test view for them too. Filtered lists keep it as you page and sort.
Because it lives in the address, two browser tabs can sit in different views without fighting each other — useful when you want a real figure and a test figure side by side.
Your last choice is remembered as the view you land in next time you open wp-admin.
What follows the view
Section titled “What follows the view”Everything with a number or a row in it:
| Screen | What scopes |
|---|---|
| Pledges | Rows, the status counts above the table, the filter dropdowns, and the export |
| Backers | The list, each backer’s detail tiles, and their activity |
| Campaigns | The list, the status counts, the menu bubble, and the Add New button |
| Campaign updates | The list and its status counts |
| A campaign’s detail page | Its money tiles and its recent pledges |
| Dashboard cash-flow widget | The 12-week chart and the Received / Pending / Refunded totals |
| Payments settings | The pledge count and amount beside each payment method |
| CSV exports | Which rows are included, and the download’s filename |
Settings themselves do not scope. Your payment credentials, your terms page, your commission rate — configuration is configuration, and it reads the same in both views. Only the numbers on those screens change.
Gateway credentials are a special case worth stating plainly: which environment a pledge settles against is decided by the campaign, never by your view. A test campaign always uses sandbox credentials, whichever view you happen to be in. Flipping to Test view cannot move real money to a sandbox, and flipping to Live view cannot charge a real card for a test pledge.
Empty screens say why they’re empty
Section titled “Empty screens say why they’re empty”The failure this guards against is real: you flip to Test view, get distracted, come back an hour later and find zeros where forty backers used to be. Nothing on screen tells you whether the data is gone or you’re just looking at the other side.
So every empty list and every zero total explains itself in words, right where the rows or the figure would be:
- “You’re in Test view. No test pledges yet.”
- “You’re in Test view. No test campaigns exist yet.” — with a link to create one
- “You’re in Test view. No test pledges match these filters.”
- “No pledges match these filters.” — the same message in Live view, blaming the filter rather than the view
A stat tile that reads zero in Test view carries a small caption underneath: “Test view — live totals are hidden.” Only zero tiles get one. A tile showing an actual test figure is self-evidently test data, and captioning every tile is exactly how the warning becomes wallpaper.
Filtering to one campaign
Section titled “Filtering to one campaign”Filtering the Pledges list to a single campaign is the one place both sides appear together — you asked for that campaign’s pledges, so you get all of them.
Rows that disagree with your current view carry a Test badge, and the empty state says so too: “This campaign has no pledges. A campaign filter shows both live and test pledges.”
Creating things
Section titled “Creating things”Buttons that create something relabel in Test view. Add New Campaign becomes Add New Test Campaign.
They read the view from the address bar, never your remembered default — so a tab left open since yesterday cannot create a campaign on the wrong side. That mistake is not recoverable: a campaign’s side is fixed once it has pledges.
Exports
Section titled “Exports”An export follows the view you ran it from, and the download says so in its name — pledges-test-2026-08-21.csv rather than pledges-2026-08-21.csv.
The rows themselves are unchanged, so anything you already feed these files into keeps working. The marker is on the filename only.
Related
Section titled “Related”- Test Campaigns — creating campaigns that exercise the real pledge flow
- Managing Pledges — the wp-admin Pledges screen
- Revenue Widget — the dashboard cash-flow chart
- Admin User Summaries — the Backers screen