An amateurish mess full of bugs – NOT RECOMMENDED

I’m currently integrating ProfileGrid into a client’s community website. We arrived at this choice after comparing different plugins and finding that ProfileGrid offered most of the functionality we need. We purchased the full license to make use of all the extensions, thinking it would give us a head start in terms of time spent on development.

If I had to make the same decision again, I would definitely not choose ProfileGrid.

Sure, if you’ve never written a line of code but nevertheless insist on building a WordPress site for yourself, ProfileGrid could be of use to you. Still, I wouldn’t spend any money on it.

And if you’re a developer like me and want to go even an inch further than what ProfileGrid has to offer, learn from my mistake and find/create something better.

First of all, just looking at the code is enough to give you a mild heart attack. It is unnecessarily bloated, highly inconsistent and just a complete mess. Every “extension” is packaged as a separate plugin, even if it adds one simple option. This adds a crazy amount of overhead.

Next you will find that the most obvious options and functions are entirely missing. For instance, in the menu restriction extension, you get options to show your pages to all the different groups you’ve created, but not to only unsubscribed users. There also is no dedicated function to retrieve all groups from the database, even though their own code continually has to do this. And don’t expect any code reference. Just some “tutorials” on how to use their shortcodes.

Finally, and most annoyingly, there are the bugs. Most of which are caused by incorrectly typed variable names. There is no room for this kind of sloppiness in software development.

To make matters worse, when I reported one of the many, many bugs I encountered, the support team literally asked me for the admin credentials of my client’s website!!! So that they could “investigate the problem”. How brazenly incompetent!

I honestly feel embarrassed for whoever created this plugin and thought it was good enough to release to the public, let alone charge money for it. But I guess that’s the difference between being a “WordPress developer” and an actual developer.