1 Star If You Ever Want To Stop Using It

  • Plug in itself was OK. I started using it a few versions back when the interface was still a bit raggedy. I upgraded to the pro.
    However the problems come if you ever want to change the way you use it, or worse still, stop using it.

    NO SELECTIVE USE
    The plug in allows for no easy on/off per pdf. There came a point when i needed to haver some pdfs on my site that were displayed as just links, not the full viewer. You can’t do that, even in the pro version. In that particular situation it was a dealbreaker for me, so i decided to look for an alternative.

    UNINSTALL CHAOS
    Worst of it is that there is no way to uninstall the viewer without leaving chaos behind it through broken shortlinks. There is no way (within the product) of listing where it is displaying the pdfs, no way of switching back to the standard uploaded pdf format – something that would take an extra few lines of code. I would have to use a third party tool to find out where the shortcode is displayed, and then manually re-upload hundreds of pdfs. It grinds my gears when developers don’t think of the uninstall, or of course they do think about it, but purposefully decide not to make it easy to discourage people from leaving.

    Very nice friendly reply from the developer when i asked about uninstalling, but he wasn’t ‘sorry’ as he claimed, if he was sorry he wouldn’t have set it up this way.

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  • Hi @gibbsyns3,

    I’m sorry to hear that you have not been wholly statisfied with your experience with the PDF Embedder plugin.

    There is a method provided in our FAQ which disables the automatic insertion of the shortcode. With the new blocks editor, this becomes extremely effective as you can use the PDF Embedder block to embed a document with the viewer, or use any other editing block add a PDF as a regular link.

    Regarding deactivation, like 99.9% of all WordPress plugins that output content via a shortcode, deactivating / uninstalling a plugin does not rewrite your content when the plugin is no longer active. This would cause utter chaos and would be completely irresponsible on a developer’s part to determine how your content is manipulated after the plugin is deactivated. Imagine if there was content added as a link and others as a shortcode, now the plugin is deactivated temporarily for some maintanence. The plugin reverts all shortcodes to links on its way out. The plugin is reactivated but there is no indication which content was supposed to be a link and which was supposed to be displayed in a different manner. The shortcodes aren’t made to revert when the plugin is deactivated to prevent accidental issues such as this. I’m sorry that you don’t agree with this methodology, but it certainly isn’t due to any malicious intent on our part to make life difficult for anyone. One thing that may help speed up the process of reverting the shortcodes would be using a search and replace tool to replace all instances of [pdf-embedder url=”path-to-pdf.pdf”] to a traditional link.

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