Filter Bar select field – chaos (again)

[Mackie]

The most recent update to the Filter Bar add-on changed a lot of the markup, added javascript functionality and messed up the existing select fields we had carefully positioned, styled, and customized functionality for.

The filter drop-downs were looking and functioning just fine before this update, now see how they look (first screenshot). The next two screenshots show the markup around these select fields before & after the recent update. The change in the markup is massive!! There’s no longer any <select> field which we were targeting with js and css — you replaced it with a div with a new class and added a bunch more divs surrounding it.

These changes you do may be nice for new users, but not for existing users. If you’re going to tell your users that we can customize the plugin files (and encourage it), then I think you should be much more careful about how your updates affect customers who have customized things. Changing the markup that extensively is often not backward compatible with sites that already customized it, and in my opinion is pretty reckless.

This is the at least the 5th time we’ve had similar problems with your plugin updates breaking our customizations (not just Filter Bar, but the main Pro plugin, and Community Events)… within the past year since the site launched.

We have completely blocked updates to any Tribe Events plugins from happening on the live site because there seems to be a really good chance that any update might break something in the layout. Every Tribe update now requires extensive local testing (and usually changes) to fix problems your updates have created. This extra time required to maintain sites with your plugins has a seriously questioning if we’ll ever use it on future sites (honestly, probably not).

Please, consider your users who are customizing your plugin before releasing updates that may break layouts or functionality. If you insist on changing core layout markup (either in templates or via js), at least add a checkbox/option to disable the new feature. Or if you need to add a new class to a dom element, fine, but don’t remove classes we may have been using.

Signing off to dig around all the recent Filter Bar changes to see what broke this site…

[Courtney]

Hi Mackie

Oh I do sympathize with all the hard work you’ve put in. It sounds like you are at least one step ahead and testing updatings on a staging server. Our maintenance releases are smaller issues with mostly just bug fixes about every 2 weeks. Our roughly monthly feature releases do come with some big changes that we hope improves the experience for our clients and their website visitors. Our last update for Filter Bar was a big one, and added in enough UI improvements that a lot of the code you are referencing has changed.

I have shared your feedback with the lead developer on the latest filter bar release, as well as the head of support staff. Our aim truly is to make a better experience for the majority of our customers. At the very least, your post is a good reminder that we should caution our more technically savvy clients to always handle feature releases on a staging server, especially if they have customized a lot of the design for the front-end.

Please know that we value your input, and will consider it as we issue feature releases for this and our other products in the future.

Thanks
Courtney

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

Posts