[Rob]

Hi there Debbie. Thanks for the note here, and for the follow-up. I just checked with the team on this, and one of our widget-minded devs suggested adding this into your CSS:

#footer-inner h4 {
font-size: 12px;
text-shadow:none;
}

That doable? If so, does it do the trick? Let me know if not or if I’m misunderstood here and I’ll adjust my reply accordingly. Thanks!

[Rob]

Excellent to hear this got you sorted, David. I just want to confirm: are you saying it didn’t work in free, but worked when you bought PRO? Or were you running versions inconsistently (ie 2.0.11 of PRO vs 3.0 of core)? Let me know…if the former, I’d like to get that sorted.

Since the idea is not for people to have to buy PRO just to get basic functionality…if that was indeed the problem, let me know so I can have the team fix whatever we need to in the core/free version. Thanks!

[Rob]

Awesome to hear this got you sorted, irt! Thanks for confirming as much. I’m going to mark Jonah’s comment the “answer” and close this out; but if we can do anything else in the future, please let us know.

[Rob]

Awesome to hear this got you sorted, Justin! Thanks for confirming as much. If we can do anything else down the road, just ask.

[Rob]

Thanks for confirming, esteban – good catch here. This is, as Jonah noted, a high priority for us. Now that we’re back on a regular release cycle and are obviously moving quicker for the short-term than just monthly releases, we should have a 3.0.2 build out real soon here. Stay tuned and thanks again for your support/patience.

[Rob]

Hi Terry. Thanks for taking the time to write this, and let me start by apologizing on behalf of the whole team here. The fact that the update wasn’t a smooth process for you is a failing on our end.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “hostile,” since I personally wrote much of the messaging we’ve used for upgrade notices, etc and wrote it to be both helpful and direct (so people understand the gravity of the update). We did try to stress actively in pre-launch materials and readme/upgrade notices that this was a huge upgrade…and that users, particularly those with customizations of any kind, are probably going to want to budget some time upon updating to clean those up based on the templating changes. This is standard practice when releasing a major update but the fact that this message wasn’t conveyed strongly enough to you is indeed another failing.

Regarding the update itself, and not sending out a newsletter blast: this was an intentional decision, as we opted to go the “soft launch” route. This was both because we launched leading into a holiday weekend, and – more importantly – because it’d allow us to catch and patch the obvious bugs early. That way, by the time we do announcements and newsletter blasts next week and the masses start updating, there’d already be a more-stable 3.0.2 on the way. In the past we’ve found that the first people to update are usually the more dev-minded, as they’re actually going into the backend of their sites looking for updates / willing to jump into the code to patch inconsistencies / etc. While I would certainly take issue with your claim that this is “lousy customer service,” as it was indeed an effort that in the past has proven more beneficial to the end users in the long run, I’m sorry you felt this way.

All that said, let’s see what we can do to get your widgets/pages sorted. As this is certainly not the behavior everyone is experiencing, it sounds like there may be something else related to your install here…and I’d like to see if we can get that addressed. If clearing your cache and checking the different templates available under Settings -> Events -> Display doesn’t have any impact, please provide a link to your site and we’ll do our best to get this sorted for you.

Thanks again for your patience and I hope this helps shed some light on the process. Now onto getting your issue resolved – I want you to be stoked about 3.0, not bummed, and we’ll do what we can to make that happen.

[Rob]

Hey Dave. Thanks for the follow-up here; we are definitely looking at something along those lines (as this request comes up more often than you’d think), but at the moment there isn’t really any route to accomplishing this beyond building something custom.

The Events in the calendar themselves are a custom post type. I believe that answers your last question here but let me know if not.

[Rob]

Joe: this was absolutely a failure on our end. We make every attempt to hit all threads within 24 hours of original posting, but this one somehow slipped through the cracks and we missed it. This was totally unacceptable and I appreciate your understanding here. That said, I want to do right by you, so if there are any plugins you’ve had your eye on – or if I could interest you in an upgrade/renewal – hit me up. My email is rob /a/ tri.be and I would be happy to comp you whatever you’d like as a “mea culpa.” Please also know that such failures to reply will not repeat themselves down the road.

[Rob]

Thanks for the detailed follow-up, Jackie. This is great to see and I really appreciate you taking the time to reply. I definitely didn’t read your initial post as a rant! We’ve seen far worst on that end 🙂 It did, however, seem you were frustrated and we take those posts just as seriously as people cursing in our faces – though that thankfully happens very infrequently.

You make some great points here:

* The 3.0 beta stopgap solution is definitely not permanent, and every month that goes past it becomes increasingly problematic. Our initial plan was to have 3.0 out the door by the end of December; the fact that we’ve been pushed beyond that is due to scope creep / bugs in the code / etc. It’s worth noting we didn’t really start offering that beta on a widespread basis until it was stable enough to offer, sometime in late March/early April. But there’s no question that offering it as a solution isn’t an acceptable one. We realize the need to get 3.0 out and I’m confident we’re finally on the cusp of doing so effectively.
* We love criticism. Not because we always feel good about what it has to say, but because it makes us a better team. The only way we’re going to improve and better serve people in your position is when we’re called out or told we’re doing something wrong. If everyone was unsatisfied and didn’t do anything, we would never know there was an issue and would never get better. So I do want to thank you for this on that basis alone.

It sounds like, if I’m reading your note right, the biggest issue that remains – which can’t wait for 3.0, anyway – is the one of the nonexistent URL. I talked this over with Barry and our internal dev team, and it is admittedly a bit of a struggle for us since we’re unable to recreate locally. But that said: we actually received an email from WooThemes’ head of support today, since he’s been seeing similar incompatibility issues between their themes and our plugin, and the discussions have begun on what we can do to truly integrate them. I can’t guarantee anything but we are committed to making it so on our end in whatever capacity is required…so know that this may change sooner than 3.0 if there is an update on the WooThemes side between now and then.

I realize that isn’t a perfect answer…but sadly it’s the best I can offer up at this time. We want to make sure you have a positive experience, and while the solution isn’t something we can specifically offer up in your use case, we are approaching every avenue – both within our own code and in terms of the other major players in the industry – that we can here. If you have any other questions or concerns, or if I failed to address a point you made here, please don’t hesitate to reach out directly to rob /a/ tri.be.

[Rob]

Hi rcstribe. Thanks for your note here, and for sharing your concerns. I want you to know that we really take this type of feedback seriously and anytime someone is feeling uneasy or as if they’re not getting their money’s worth, it raises a serious red flag. I know how it feels to be in your position and it sucks.

Couple points here: first, I should note that while your solution isn’t a bad one, it isn’t really how WordPress was designed. The use of “Private” functionality exists to limit frontend access to posts/events/etc. It isn’t intended to serve as a backend filtering solution or as a way of saving draft posts. This issue you’ve reported, as Barry notes, is definitely a bug with our system. But I think you could save yourself a lot of hassle by just using the “Draft” format (or “Pending Review”) instead of Private, to achieve the same end. (I’m not aware of the privacy concerns you note regarding drafts being exposed.)

More importantly…it’s worth providing some insight on our development cycle, I think, and the development cycle for plugins in general. In an ideal world we would be fixing every single bug that is brought to our attention on the spot, and releasing a dot-release immediately thereafter to address it. But the reality is that this is unfortunately just not feasible when you’re on a broader development schedule and working with a fixed budget. We try to be as transparent as possible as to our process: that is, regular monthly maintenance releases where we fix all bugs and incorporate features as budget allows it.

We have deviated from that monthly release cycle these past few months. This was a calculated decision because we feel the end result – a highly modified, much better calendar solution – is something the community wants, and so if it meant sacrificing maintenance builds for a few months to make the finished product that much better, so be it. The majority of our users have been receptive to this and super stoked about it. We even actually did release a maintenance build, 2.0.11, back in January that addressed most of the critical bugs we were aware of at the time. For other things that have arisen in that time, we’ve tried our best to provide people with working solutions that can tide them over: either via code snippets here in the forum or by giving them the 3.0 code (beta) to test if the problem is resolved. That said there are limits to what level of support we can provide for a $50 plugin…which means that some of these bugs and other issues can’t really be addressed except by the devs, in the codebase, for the next release. I would love to be able to provide every single user who is stuck or facing a problem with the current release a solid code snippet or tutorial that temporarily solved their problem. But it’s sadly just not possible.

The particular issue you’ve noted here – private categories being problematic – falls into that category of bugs above. It is logged and on our docket to address for 3.0; I’m pushing to make sure that gets done for the initial 3.0 release because this is a bug and is absolutely our responsibility to address. But since it effects such a small subset of our users (yours is the first report I’ve seen of this) and there isn’t a straightforward “here are 3 steps to take for a workaround” route available, we hope you’ll understand the position we’re in when it comes to releasing new builds.

I would take issue with your claim that we’re “ignoring” issues, though. I can say with certainty that every legitimate bug that comes to light with the plugin is logged with our team and addressed in the next release, regardless of whether that’s a major release like 3.0 or a dot release like 2.0.11. If there are other issues you haven’t reported that are not limited to some aspect of your setup, then we certainly want to hear what those are so we can make sure they’re on the docket. But it’s unfortunate to see accusations like that thrown around when we make every effort to address every single bug that crosses our path, and the backlog of nearly 3000 threads in the forum archive here should attest to that.

I hope this helped shed some light on things. Please do know we feel your pain and that we are working our hardest to get the new release out. We aren’t waiting for it to be perfect (a day which never comes in any development cycle), but we also aren’t yet at the point where we have a finished product. I suspect we’re less than a month out at this time but if this timetable isn’t ambitious enough for you, let me know. I want to do right by you so if that means giving you a refund so you can purchase a solution that better meets your needs, we’ll make it happen. My email is rob /a/ tri.be and if you wanted to take me up on that offer or share any other concerns you might have, my door is always open.

[Rob]

Hi Wolfgang. (I can’t reply to your message privately.) We generally do not provide refunds on purchases if someone expects a feature that isn’t promoted on the product page (https://theeventscalendar.com/shop/wordpress-wootickets/) . Between that, the new user primer and this pre-sales forum, we try to provide every avenue for answering questions so people can make an informed decision. If users are familiar with the The Events Calendar system, there shouldn’t be any surprises in terms of how tickets are setup and look. Remember you can also see a frontend demo at the link provided above.

That said: if you buy and find it doesn’t meet your needs, we want to do right by you…so we’d probably give you a refund either way. We really encourage folks to read all the pre-purchase material to avoid that though.

Hope this helps! Let me know if not, or if you’ve got other questions.

[Rob]

Correct. That would probably be your best bet. I checked with the dev team and they admittedly didn’t have anything they could specifically offer up. That said, by our estimate, a skilled dev here with 2 hours of their time could probably build something that did the trick nicely on this end.

Hope that helps and sorry I couldn’t offer more. If you have other questions, please do let me know. Thanks again for your interest.

[Rob]

Hey Kindra. Adding the HTML tag at this point is the only way to do it. But if your client isn’t down to take that route, we’re finishing 3.0 now and our goal is to have it out within the next month. I don’t want to promise anything but we are definitely down to the home stretch.

Hope that helps and sorry I couldn’t offer more. Let me know if you have any other questions here.

[Rob]

Hey Harry. It shouldn’t; you don’t actually uninstall core to activate PRO, so those will remain in place and unmodified. For the new views on the frontend – recurrence or venue, for example – you may need to add customizations (as those views weren’t present in the version you modified). But otherwise it should be consistent.

I’d backup first as a matter of general safety, though. Hope that helps and please let me know if you need anything else here. Thanks for your interest.

[Rob]

Hey Abdel. Thanks for the note here. We have a frontend demo – so you can checkout how the tickets look and the overall order process – at http://wpshindig.com/event/the-events-calendar-wootickets-wordpress-demo/.

Hope that helps. If you have other questions or need anything else here, please do let me know and I’ll get you what you need.

[Author]

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