No Additional Themes/Skins, Really??!

[Brian]

We purchased your Events Calendar PRO version with the expectation that it would come with some variety of optional themes/skins. However, after scanning through the Settings page and then reading your documentation, I’m seeing that instead of providing optional themes, you’ve mapped-out the laborious and frustrating process of developing our own custom code and styles for this plug-in. Really?? We just paid $90 so we can still waste hours of our own time dressing-up your plugin? Am I missing something?

[Josh]

Hey Brian,

Thanks for reaching out to us!

I apologize for any confusion about the options available within our plugin when you decided to purchase. So we can reconsider some of the presentation, would you mind pointing out anything on our sales page that may have led to this confusion?

Our default styles are intended to be clean, minimal designs for each available view that provide a structured display of all the needed content without conflicting with any theme styles. We have actively decided not to include additional skins/themes into our plugin since it opens up a potentially large rabbit hole since we would never be able to create enough skins to satisfy the customization desires of all of our users.

This is why we do have options to make it easy to develop your own styles for your calendar. As you’ve noted we have documented this process within our Themer’s Guide and we can also help to get you pointed in the right direction for some customizations here in our forums.

If the primary features of PRO (additional views, recurring events, default content) weren’t what you were looking for and we improperly set expectations about additional themes/skins we would be happy to provide a refund for your purchase. You can request a refund by sending a request to support[at]theeventscalendar.com.

I apologize again for the inconvenience and confusion.

Thanks!

[Brian]

Hi Josh,

In response to your question, I was attracted to the styles and presentation shown on your screenshots page (https://wordpress.org/plugins/the-events-calendar/screenshots/). There’s not too much difference between what your screenshots show and what appears when we install the plugin and select the “Tribe Events Styles”, but there are differences, which means we have to spend time/energy sorting that out. While I appreciate that you’ve developed decent functionality with this product, it is disappointing not to have even a small offering of out-of-the-box, diverse skins to choose from. Of course you can’t satisfy every user, but that’s not a good excuse to make no respectable effort.

I would think that a small offering of clever, creative styles would better showcase your product and its potential. It would show that you’ve taken the initiative to consider how your users might want to use your product, or how it might fit into various environments and themes. Not only that, but it would give your product a greater value to users like myself who don’t want to spend hours reading documentation, copying files/folders, writing additional code, etc. immediately after dropping $90 on this plug-in. I understand you look upon your minimalist approach as freedom for the user, but from a consumer perspective, I regret spending $90 on what is not an all-inclusive solution.

Even if I have to customize my own styles, it would be much better if you had created all the logic, file and folder structures within your own plug-in directories so that all I have to do is edit and tweak the CSS from that location instead of having to read, find, copy, paste, etc. It quite honestly feels like I’m finishing someone else’s job in following your process for customization. It doesn’t make sense for me to backtrack at this point, so I don’t want a full refund. However, as a customer, I do not feel I’ve received good value for my money thus far and I’d be inclined to caution others who might fall into the same trap. You should consider increasing the value of your product with a respectable styles offerings, or otherwise mitigate these missed expectations by any of these methods: reducing the cost of your plug-in, adding a warning to customers about your customization process, and/or offering partial refunds to dissatisfied customers.

[Josh]

Hey Brian,

Thanks for following up with us!

I wanted to start by following up on one of your comments directly. You mention:

Even if I have to customize my own styles, it would be much better if you had created all the logic, file and folder structures within your own plug-in directories so that all I have to do is edit and tweak the CSS from that location instead of having to read, find, copy, paste, etc.

This is definitely a good point and something that we have considered. However, when taking our template based approach, we felt we were taking the best approach for the majority of our users particularly considering the long-term flexibility for those looking to customize the way their calendar displays. We still feel that this is the best approach at this time.

But, if you would like an easier starting point for managing simple style changes, you can create a stylesheet within a “tribe-events” folder within your theme. So, for PRO customization, you can create a new file within your theme at tribe-events > pro > tribe-events-pro.css copy in the contents from the tribe-events-pro-theme.css file from the “resources” folder within the PRO plugin as well as the tribe-events-theme.css from the “resources” folder from within the Core plugin.

This will allow you to take the existing code and customize as you would like rather than writing the styles from scratch to create the customization that you would like.

Let me know if this helps.

Thanks!

 

 

[Brian]

Josh,

I have followed your abridged customization steps, but they did not work. First, your process assumes I am trying to customize the style of one of the main calendar views, but in this case, I am trying to customize the widget. Within the two separate folder structures for this plugin (the-events-calendar, events-calendar-pro), there are some 34 individual CSS files. I have copied them all to the directory at \wp-content\themes\theme1\tribe-events\pro\, and after identifying the file called widget-calendar-theme.css as the source of the original styling, I proceeded to edit this file with my customizations. However, upon saving the file and reloading my webpage, the changes are not being applied. I also tried moving this file up one folder to \tribe-events\ to no avail.

This is too frustrating, and I will be posting a review about my experience so others can be duly informed. This goose-chase customization method simply reinforces my point about offering out-of-the box styles, or even creating a folder structure within your plugin that is easy to customize. I suppose the unfortunate solution is to backup the plugin directory and then edit the CSS files freely right where they are. However, you guys should really know better. What a mess!

[Josh]

Hey Brian,

I apologize for the confusion in the last post. You don’t need to copy each of the other stylesheets over to your theme. The override here is that if you have the “tribe-events-pro.css” file within your theme at the proper location (tribe-events > pro > tribe-events-pro.css), this file will be loaded after the plugin styles and override the default styles. This way you don’t have to customize the core plugin files and lose those customizations when updating. We never suggest or expect users to edit the core plugin files for their customizations.

In the previous response, I was only suggesting copying the Pro styles into that file so it would mimic more of an automatic file that you could customize, similar to my understanding of what you were requesting as an alternative in your previous response. I apologize if I only added to the confusion with this suggestion.

We do however appreciate your overall feedback. We currently believe that our approach to customizations is the best of the alternatives available, however your comments have sparked an internal conversation and we’ll be reviewing this again just to make sure our team continues to feel the same way. If you have any further suggestions that you think would be useful on this front, such as examples of plugins that do something similar to what you were expecting as well as any changes that you would like to see in regards to how customizations are done. For example, maybe there could be some admin controls for changing things such as colors or fonts?

Additionally, I did want to point you in the direction of some available “skins” that are out in the marketplace for our plugin. The general rule in WordPress is that themes are for the styling of your site and plugins are for the functionality. This is one of the main factors that drives our decisions in regards to the way we handle our plugin styles. So, here are a few themes that have done some killer customizations that you could purchase and use as potential “skins” for your own site:

Boxy Theme
Eventica

I did want to apologize again about the confusion and improper expectations about what our PRO plugin offers. If there is anything in our sales copy or marketing that led to your expectations of additional skins/themes for the plugin, we are eager to address these issues quickly so other users don’t have the same expectations when purchasing. And on this note, as you do share your experience with other users via a detailed review, we would appreciate it if you did include a link to this forum thread as part of the context of that review.

Finally, I would like to remind you that we do offer 30 days to request a refund. If the plugin overall isn’t what you were expecting and you feel you would like a refund, we are happy to refund your purchase.

Thanks!

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

[Author]

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