Be prepared to fuss with it a lot…

It works, but you get the sense someone decided to ship it at about 90% done.

For me the most frustrating thing was the inflexibility of the markup, or rather the layout that the markup facilitates. I wanted a stripped-down email-field-with-instructive-placeholder-and-submit-button form. No field labels, no “* = required” text, nada. You’re not gonna get it without hacking the plugin. So layout and styling on this plugin is pretty inflexible.

When you do crack open the code, you’ll learn that the fields are all surrounded by LI tags, which… why? Semantically, this makes zero sense.

The quality of the code itself is a little suspect. There are dozens of lines of commented-out code in the plugin, and the comments are fun… things like “class this sh!t out, and pass it into the activation hook” (which they did) and “probably should do some checking before sending this off” (which they did not, yay for unsanitized function inputs!). Another function contains nothing but a comment “buh-bye!” The code history makes clear that this is a refactored release, so it’s pretty amazing to imagine what it looked like before that.

Lastly, the grammar of the user-facing text leaves something to be desired. An error message reading “Member Not Added, Member may have already been added. Please Try Again” is just cringe-worthy, with its run-on sentence and nonsensical rando capitalization.

I’m trying not to hate on this plugin too hard, because it does work, or seems to so far, and it’s doing a lot of stuff. Aaaaaaand it’s free. So there’s that. And I am grateful. However, the generalized lack of attention to detail leaves me with this sense of concern that there’s functional gaps too that I just haven’t seen yet. I feel like I should be in there checking the error-handling, but man, I am not eager to spend any more time than I already have cleaning up third-party plugin code!