All marketing, crappy product – does not even follow good coding practices

I have been testing this plugin with a new theme that’s under development. The theme is focussed on performance and follows best practices for WordPress coding.

This plugin will not even work with our new theme because the coding is so sloppy. Specifically…

1. No shortcode should do anything unless/until it’s actually used on a page. This plugin goes ahead and loads/executes code just by being activated, when not even being used. This is hard on site performance and should not be done.

2. As soon as it’s activated this plugin breaks our test site. It’s doing this by erasing PHP output buffers that are created by the theme. No plugin should ever do something like that. All i get is a white page because the page has been erased by this plugin.

3. Slideshows do not work because they depend on a Javascript library called jQuery, which must be loaded before the plugin’s Javascript. For this to work properly a plugin must declare the dependency on jQuery of its Javascript code. There are two good ways to do this. This plugin does not declare any dependency, resulting in its Javascript breaking and the slideshows not working.

Not impressed… ??