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Hey Steve. Just a heads up that Chris is aware of your follow-up, and should be getting over a reply here shortly today. Thanks!
Hey Jonathan. I just sent you an email following up on this, with my plan for success going forward. Based on what’s suggested in that email I’m closing this thread so we can move to the new avenue outlined. If that proposal doesn’t work please let me know via email and I’ll instead follow whatever you’d like to see happen.
Hey twentwatchers. Thanks for the follow-up here, and sorry we disappointed you. I actually was starting to draft a reply to everyone impacted by the other thread there to let them know a bit behind our reasoning, but since you posted this before I could get that finished, I’ll just reply here.
I’ll start by reiterating that we’re sorry we let you down here. And while I know Barry has – at every step of the way – attempted to be polite, respectful and helpful, I apologize if it didn’t come across as such when reading it. But know that we care deeply about the community and making the plugin work for them. At the end of the day, we’re just a bunch of people who love WordPress and want to see everyone using it doing cool stuff. While we may sometimes be less able to help a user achieve their end goal, we always feel bad when doing so…and never would actively intend to hold someone back.
I feel as though Barry explained the Genesis integration issue with grace and patience in that other thread, so I won’t go very deep into that subject, except to say there are unfortunately limitations to how well the plugin will integrate with every theme using every combination of settings. From the looks of that thread it does appear in fact that it wasn’t a “Hey, how can I do X Y and Z?” discussion to begin with, but rather a number of issues posted as one thread (rather than separate threads with specific steps to recreate) posed as a general “why doesn’t the plugin work on my site?” comment. These are challenging enough to address when posted independently; and when other folks such as yourself and Gould chime in, it makes it even more difficult to understand exactly where the feedback ends and where the substantive need for support begins. (This is another reason we ask users post their issues separately, in their own threads.)
I am a bit confused when you note how any ‘well built theme’ would have issues here, since the only one I know for a fact we have an unworkable conflict with is Striking. The archive of threads posted by users running a wide range of themes here on the forum should attest to that. But ultimately, it sounds like there are enough high-level differences between how our plugin is coded and how you want to use it that I’m guessing this just might not be a particularly good fit. And to be honest, I’m not sure it’s really fair to continue to subject my team to hostilities when they’re just trying to do their jobs.
I’m sorry, too, that you hear this as a matter of ““Bla bla bla I’m not listening, I know it better”. Please know this is by no means our intention, and indeed the thread-in-question here did get some interesting discussions going on the team about how customers are using the plugin and where we may want to take it in future releases. We would be foolish not to consider this. But listening/considering it is not the same as being able to act on-the-spot. In an ideal world, where resources and time abounded? Yes, we’d make changes on the fly whenever a user requested them, and would release those that day. But unfortunately this isn’t the reality. We’ve already got the entire August/September maintenance release booked with bug fixes and other performance tweaks, and so changes to further optimize integration with themes that isn’t covered by those tickets – or general features/enhancements we’ve got on the radar – won’t be addressed until the known widespread bug fixes we’re working on are out the door. Please know this feedback IS being listened to…and that we’re not taking a position of “we known better,” but rather is one of “we have to prioritize bug fixes.”
I’m not going to delete this thread, because in the interest of transparency I believe it should be left in place. But I will say I’m disappointed to see it come through and we hope that – like the other users who are patient and understanding when told the limitations of the plugin – we can keep a mutual level of respect going here on the forums. If that isn’t something you can agree to, I’m unfortunately going to have to insist that we refund your money and ask you take your business elsewhere.
I really hope it doesn’t come to that, though. If you’d like to continue the discussion via email – which is a more appropriate venue for this type of feedback than a support forum – I welcome it, and can be reached at rob /a/ tri.be.
Hey Simon! Just wanted to follow-up here as per Barry’s last note. Can you let us know if you need anything else, or if this thread can indeed be closed? Thanks in advance.
Hey there moatplayers. Thanks for the follow-up here; I actually addressed this just a moment ago in a separate-but-related thread (in which you’ve also commented): https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/plugins-that-may-conflict-with-wootickets-3-0-2-no-tickets-on-the-event-page/.
Ultimately it’s an issue with that plugin’s codebase that is unfortunately not something easily rectifiable; but I understand if it puts you in a tough position and I apologize for the experience there.
Hey everyone. Thanks for the follow-ups and patience here. We discussed this on our meeting with the development team yesterday, and this is something we’re looking into – but unfortunately there is no easy solution or workaround we can provide at this time. We realize that NextGen is a long-lasting and widely used plugin, but there are aspects of how it’s coded that run counter to some of the WordPress best practices + coding standards we’ve used to build our plugin. It poses a unique challenge as a result.
We are absolutely keeping this on the radar and will seek to better integrate in a future release, but for the maintenance build we’re focused on at the moment (the August release), we’re realistically going to be focused exclusively on widespread bugs with our codebase. At the moment this is scheduled to be investigated further for our next / subsequent maintenance release, though I cannot guarantee anything.
My apologies to everyone for the inconvenience they’re faced with so far. Have you raised this with the developers of that plugin? We’d be happy to provide them some feedback or work with them to see if either/both sides could better optimize to ensure smoother integration. Feel free to email us directly (pro /a/ tri.be) if you see value in that approach.
Hello Jonathan, thanks for the follow-up here. I looked into this further for you today and what you’ve requested here actually falls more into the realm of a customization – as that’s the intended design of the plugin, to have the menu option highlighted whenever an event/events-related page is accessed. But this is something you should be able to do using Javascript relatively easily: you already obviously know what the base URL for the events page is, so using Javascript you’d remove the highlighting when that URL is not actually what’s accessed (and add it back when it is).
As for the points you’ve made here, I’ve addressed them + your comments in a separate thread you’ve posted: https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/repeating-event-shows-daily/. I’m going to mark the answer here and close the thread but please let me know if you have further questions at the aforementioned link.
Hello again Jonathan:
I appreciate your follow-up. To be honest I think it’s time we had a serious discussion here, which I’m happy to do via email if you’d prefer. I’ve been reviewing your responses both here and in the other threads – some of which I’ve already been involved in myself, others which were handled by my colleagues – and I have to say I’m a bit concerned at the way things are proceeding.
I want to stress again that we understand your frustration and apologize for failing to meet your expectations of timely service. We want you to succeed and understand that you have client deliverables with a business to run yourself. But please understand where I’m coming from when I say that, if we’re going to continue to work together, the hostile comments here on the forum are going to have to end. There are a couple of realities we’re unfortunately all dealing with at the moment:
- Support time is currently extending beyond the 48 hour window in some situations. We’re eager to get this resolved both to keep everyone happy / replied to within 24 hours, and because we too feel the pain of operating understaffed with such a load. Luckily, as I noted yesterday, we already added one new member today.
- This is a relatively new code-base where there are inevitably going to be bugs we didn’t catch in the QA process. As those are reported, we’ll patch them in our monthly maintenance builds so that every few weeks the plugin gets better & increasingly stable.
I see that in at least 3 of the other threads you’ve posted, my colleagues have provided workarounds and followed-up to ensure they met your needs, making modifications when you requested them. While those did stretch into the week range for a reply, they were – to the best of my knowledge – ultimately closed and addressed to your satisfaction. We ask for your respect and patience as we work to address what threads/issues remain, and your understanding that it would be unfair to other community members if we focused more resources on one user who reported multiple issues than on distributing support help evenly to everyone.
Like the other users here on the forum, we’re going to need you to be patient and have the confidence that we are committed to getting your issues sorted. If that is something you’re not going to be able to agree to, I’m afraid I must insist that we refund your money and you take your business elsewhere. I’d really rather not go that route, though…what I’m just hoping is that we can all hit the “Reset” button and try to get this relationship back on track.
Thanks for understanding and do feel free to reach out to me directly, rob /a/ tri.be, if you’d like to continue this discussion offline.
Hey jadonulrich. Thanks for the follow-up. It’s definitely possible there is an iCloud issue, we haven’t tested the iCal integration with iCloud at all on our end. When you ask for the URL: do you mean something like http://wpshindig.com/events/?ical ?
Hello Jonathan. Thanks for the follow-up; sorry to hear the answer wasn’t to your liking. It appears I misunderstood the source of the problem here and after reviewing with the team just now was able to make better sense of it.
It appears the source of the issue here is that you’ve disabled the Event Search Bar – and with that bar disabled, so it relies on the “old” fashion, no submit button appears (and without AJAX loading enabled, there is noting to trigger the date change in IE8). At this time if you’re going to work with the Event Search Bar disabled you will be limiting access for users on older browsers such as IE8. I absolutely agree with you that there should be a workaround for users such as yourself, and we do want to do what we can to support users in this situation and are looking now at either A ) adding a Submit button or B ) forcing the datepicker to be live. It unfortunately isn’t something we can provide a snippet to workaround for, but know that – thanks to you bringing it to our attention – this is now on the radar and being worked into our monthly maintenance release cycle. This will address the loading spinner problem too, which looks to be a byproduct of the way we coded it.
Just so you’re aware of how our development process works, as it may possibly clear up some confusion: whenever a major product overhaul is released, there are unfortunately bound to be bugs that weren’t caught in the QA process. While I wish we could say that every time we start a new lifecycle for the plugin, we were confident we were releasing a 100% bug-free plugin…that’s sadly unreasonable to expect and hasn’t been the case at any of the plugin shops I’ve been involved with. I can say with confidence that we spent literally hundreds of hours QAing this release before we pushed it out, and ultimately got it to the point where we felt – and still do feel – it was stable enough for release. While there were use cases we might have missed in our testing, and early adopters such as yourself would likely be among the first to catch + report those, we are patching them as they come in as part of our monthly release cycle. This should be apparent based on the builds we’ve released over the past month focused exclusively on bug fixes. While we hope early adopters will understand this and tried to convey the gravity of this update, it appears we failed you there. And I – along with the whole team – am sorry for that.
The delayed response time on support threads is also a definite failing on our end. We didn’t adequately prepare for the support load that came with the new release, and on top of that one of our team members quit unexpectedly right after we launched. But you should know we’ve been working hard to get some new folks on the team to help ease the load and the first of them starts tomorrow, which should have a noticeable impact immediately.
While we’re actively working to both stabilize the codebase and make our documentation more understandable to end users, and have already taken clear steps to do so, I would totally understand if you didn’t want to continue using the plugin for future projects. I hope we can – through continued bug fixes and new documentation – earn back your trust. I welcome your feedback on how we could do that (beyond the obvious issues outlined here), and particularly whether there’s any documentation you would find particularly helpful, so that I can get the ball rolling there. If not, know that the offer for a full refund to take your business someplace that better meets your needs is (and will remain) on the table.
Hi there Graeme. Good question; while this is outside my area of expertise, it doesn’t seem particularly unreasonable. Let me see if Barry or another member of the team can point you in the right direction here.
Milcms: in the interest of keeping things organized, I’m going to close out this thread. If you’d be so kind – assuming the issue persists – as to create a new thread outlining your problem, we’ll do what we can to get you sorted in as timely a fashion as possible. Thanks!
