Hi @taisho,
Thanks for your honest feedback, I appreciate it. Constructive criticism helps us to improve the product. I’d just like to respond to your points:
No built in responsiveness for horizontal tabs
Yes, sort of. The plugin does have some limited responsiveness, based on what the underlying library (jQuery UI) offers. We do, however, have a new plugin in beta testing right now which will allow your tabs to switch to accordions automatically at responsive sizes. This provides a better user experience on the mobile than tabs do. We’re hoping to release the new plugin some time in the next few months, but this will almost certainly be a premium (i.e. paid) plugin, to help contribute to the continued development of Squelch Tabs and Accordions Shortcodes.
We’re also looking into creating a new widget to be used as an alternative to [tabs] which would create a vertical tab structure, with the “tabs” shown as a vertical menu-like list in a sidebar and the content area to the side of it. Such a feature would require a lot of work to implement, and as such would also probably be provided by a premium plugin.
No Font Awesome icons for tab titles
True. You can however link to any icon graphic you wish when declaring your [tab] shortcodes.
Part of the problem here is that if the plugin loads its own instance of Font Awesome then that would interfere with anything else that is loading Font Awesome. What we might do is look at making it so that the plugin detects one or more other existing FA plugins and piggybacks their code if they’re available.
Can’t set things like font size, but it can easily be changed through CSS, so no problem for me
Admittedly it’s not straightforward, but it can certainly be done. There are two methods: CSS (as you found for yourself) or by rolling your own custom jQuery UI theme using the jQuery UI theme roller (https://jqueryui.com/themeroller/) and then following the instructions here: https://squelchdesign.com/presentation/roll-theme-squelch-tabs-accordions-shortcodes-plugin/
It’s a bit misleading that settings are under Appearance menu and on installed plugins list there is no settings option for this plugin what at start led me to think there are no settings at all
Appearance is actually the correct place for these settings, because they relate entirely to the appearance of your tabs and accordions (apart from the hidden “Advanced options” that are a relatively new addition, and may be moved elsewhere in the future).
WordPress keeps all appearance related settings under the Appearance menu. We’re actually looking to move these into the customizer at some point soon anyway, which is now the correct place for these settings to be stored. Some plugins do indeed add an extra option to the plugin list that creates a shortcut to the plugin’s settings page. This is non-standard but many plugin authors choose to do it for user convenience. We may do the same in the future.
I think that some preview of available themes would be nice, checking them one by one is quite a chore and I couldn’t find any online source for these themes
I completely agree it would be good to get a preview on the settings screen.
We have been considering this, but there are a number of barriers to implementing it, the most crucial being that we cannot guarantee that your theme does not interfere with the rendering of tabs. So a preview might end up looking quite different to the end result on your website. Because we’re looking to move the settings for the plugin into the customizer there would be little point in adding this feature at this stage, since the plugin and the customizer could work together to offer live previews of settings changes, i.e. a live preview that takes into consideration any changes from your theme or custom CSS.
For now you can find an online source for the themes on the jQuery UI theme roller: https://jqueryui.com/themeroller/ If you choose the “Gallery” tab in the sidebar on the left then you can see all of the available themes there.
