5-star plugin, 1-star support

On one hand, this plugin is very useful, has great documentation, and seems to be quite well maintained.

Unfortunately, my experience interacting with the plugin author was very unpleasant and resulted in him issuing me a refund that I did not ask for, essentially “banning” me from using his plugin.

In troubleshooting an issue that I was having with tags not outputting correctly, he wanted unrestricted root access to my site and FTP. This made me quite uneasy, but I set up an admin account for him with limited access to what I thought would be necessary in order for him to troubleshoot, and gave him FTP credentials to my staging site’s files.

I also asked him why he needed such extensive access. My question was never meant to offend, I was truly curious about what his debugging process was going to look like. I didn’t think it was unreasonable to inquire about what someone would potentially be doing with my site files and configuration.

His response (this was after I had given him FTP credentials):

OK, I’ll bite. Talk me through how I (as a WordPress developer with 10 years experience) should be debugging this without any form of FTP access – bearing in mind I cannot reproduce the fault on our installations anywhere other than your site, and I have zero other reports from customers of this issue.

I responded with a some basic troubleshooting suggestions, one of which I later discovered to be the problem. However, he (quite rudely) dismissed all of them with the following response:

You can check the console on our site
– Did that, why do you assume I didn’t?

or even just the DOM to see if there are any known script conflicts.
– Did that, why do you assume I didn’t?

You can ask me specific details about my Divi configuration.
– I can, but this wouldn’t resolve the issue, and result in a lot of back and forth. Interesting that you want me to fight to give support here vs. provide the requested details so I can quickly and smoothly resolve.

Does it matter that I’m using a child theme?
– It does not, which is why I did not ask

Does it matter that I’m using global modules?
– It does not, which is why I did not ask

Are there any other Divi-specific settings that might conflict with your plugin?
– How long is a piece of string? If I knew this, (a) they would be fixed, and (b) I wouldn’t need to then ask

You can look into how I’ve set up the content group or keywords to see if it’s simply user error.
– Did that, why do you assume I didn’t?

I’ve emphasized my suggestion about global modules because it turned out that this in fact was the issue, even though the plugin author dismissed it. Because I was using a Divi layout with global modules, all of my generated pages were pulling the content from the global layout and it was overriding the content generated from this plugin. When I changed my layout to use normal modules instead of global, everything worked perfectly.

This is precisely the reason that I wanted to go through these basic questions first. It was ultimately a silly oversight on my part and one that could have been easily and quickly resolved with basic troubleshooting, no root access necessary.

He also claimed that I had not given him access to the Divi Builder, which I had in fact done and confirmed by logging into the account I had set up for him. It wasn’t showing up on his end I was happy to try to get that sorted for him, but he had already issued a refund at that point (again, I did not ask for this refund).

Overall, there is nothing wrong with the functionality of this plugin. However, the attitude of the plugin author is extremely unprofessional, which is just as important to the overall experience in my opinion. I don’t believe anything that I said or did throughout our correspondence warranted the way he treated me and I would be nervous to ever work with him in the future, regardless of how talented of a developer he might be.

TL;DR – if you’re using the Divi theme with this plugin, make sure you’re not using global modules (most people don’t, which is probably why none of his other customers using Divi are reporting this issue). It’ll save you a conversation with support and a possible forced refund of your purchase.