Add-ons: Pre-sales questions and where to ask them…
-
Hi,
I’m interesting in some of the premium add-ons to your plugin, and I’m wondering specifically if I need two of them or can get by with just one of them. I don’t see anywhere here or on your dedicated site to ask those questions.
The add-on plugin that I feel sure that I need is AMR USERS+, since I definitely need sorting/filtering on multiple variables for the finished product. I’m a little unclear, however, just from the documentation how well this will work – for instance if I will easily be able to a add a list of possible choices in dropdown format for a a given filter type.
What’s not clear to me is whether I will need the S2Member add-on, too. The site is an S2Member Pro site, with multiple custom fields, and we need to be able to output and filter on them almost exclusively in outputting our member directories. (One of the main reasons I’m turning to your plugin, incidentally, is that built-in S2Member List/Search capabilities were impractical – hard to customize and very slow.) I can’t tell from your documentation whether AMR USERS+ will filter on S2Member Custom Profile fields. If so, then the other S2Member-specific features of the S2Member add-on look unnecessary to me.
If there is a better place for me to ask pre-sales questions, please let me know. If worse comes to worse, I may just purchase the Plus plugin, see if it works, and, if it doesn’t email you then, but it would be wasteful for both of us if I do all of this only to discover that what I want to do cannot be accomplished at all, and have to ask for a refund.
The other question I have is how actively this plugin is being developed and updated. i see you active in your support threads, but it seems that the plugin itself hasn’t been updated or checked for compatibility in some months (or more). I know it’s been around for many years (I used it on a site around 2012 or so), but I don’t want to make the investment in development time, or leave it with development clients, if I can’t assure the latter that the plugin and add-ons will still (probably) work a year or two from now…
Thanks much for your help and for the great plug-in.
CK
-
Hi CK,
Best place for non free stuff queries is the contact page https://wpusersplugin.com/about/contact/ (has email address )
If you want to do filtering, then amr users plus is necessary. Note that it will automatically present dropdown values for the data that is there (after a rebuild cache run). You cannot add values for data that is not there, as it builds up the choices from the data that is there and will therefore return records. Create test data to see more options while testing.
The other add-on’s then deal with any anomalies that a third party plugin may be creating with it’s methods of storing data. S2 member custom fields in particular make life a little hard. This post https://wpusersplugin.com/3086/user-lists-and-filtering-with-s2member-fields/ is a bit old, but attempts to explain how S2member custom fields appear without the S2M add-on, and what the add-on tries to do to improve the situation.
You could start with just plus and without the s2member add-on and see whether you can achieve what you want with the way that the data is stored and the formatting options now available in amr-users-plus (eg: unis timestamps to more human readable dates & times etc)
You should note that a future direct SQL version (ie no caching) of this plugin will NOT easily be able to filter and sort on fields that are nested within one user meta record. If it is important to be able to query and filter on these custom fields then you may be better off creating those fields with some other plugin that stores the data one field per usermeta record.
- The topic ‘Add-ons: Pre-sales questions and where to ask them…’ is closed to new replies.
