deeply flawed

  • michaeljamisontttttttttttttt

    (@michaeljamisontttttttttttttt)


    8 years, 9 months ago

    Revision Note! Most of my complaints were addressed by the plugin authors, and so I have changed my rating. It’s just sad that, it took this review to get them to acknowledge that the flaws I had been telling them about were real and did need to be fixed. Bad feelings all around, even to the point of them dropping my ongoing payments to support the plugin. A bit of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

    Unfortunately, as much work has gone into this plugin, it has some serious basic flaws that render many of it’s features that are promoted to be easier to use than writing code in PHP as useless.

    The short code logic conditionals will not function if the data entry is modified or deleted. It will leave a zero as the field entry, which still reads as true, which negates the if statement.(this was fixed)

    The Pods auto templating is buggy esp. if using it with Genesis archives.

    Pods fields do not integrate with Visual Composer. You cannot do an orderby based on a Pods field in Visual composer.

    The Pods field option that is designated as File/Image/Video is in fact only useful for inputting images. It will not function for video and there is no way to insert the file path.(fixed)

    The pods DATE field, is also flawed. While there is ostensibly an option to use only the year, the entry must be made with a full day. month year in order to register. If the date is changed, the field can’t reset and if it is deleted, the date returns a value of zero, instead of no date at all.(fixed)

    If you create a field of a type and decide to change that type, such as a currency to a number- it won’t work. You must delete the field and create a new one, and not use the same name.

    I have used this plugin many times and supported it. I have regretfully come to the conclusion that for making and using custom post types and fields the flaws outweigh the advantages.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Contributor Scott Kingsley Clark

    (@sc0ttkclark)

    I just sent you a follow-up e-mail about the conversation you had with your support team today.

    It looks like you’re describing multiple issues here in this review, some of which were previously unknown to us until today when you reported them on Slack, but we’ll have our team create your new bug reports and follow up through our official bug reporting system on GitHub – https://github.com/pods-framework/pods/issues

    1. Shortcode conditionals are a new feature to Pods, they don’t cover all use-cases and like you stated, they only check non-empty values. Unfortunately 0 doesn’t count as non-empty in this logic check, but we can certainly take a look at it and see about making this more efficient based on the field type.
    2. The Pods Auto Templating issue with Genesis Archives is also a new issue we weren’t aware of, but we’ll take a look and see if we can get some better compatibility with the way Genesis handles archives. It’s working for many other themes, but it’s difficult to test compatibility in some themes until we’re notified of an issue.
    3. We don’t have any custom integration with many plugins or themes on CodeCanyon, and other visual builder plugins out there. Integration requires we maintain active subscriptions to the various products and that’s not possible to do with our limited budget. We’re a free plugin, so we depend on our users to let us know where they’d like to see integration and fixes for issues that might be occurring in these various products. We’ll ask around and see if anyone has a copy of Visual Composer for us to look at and see what might be going wrong there. If it’s an enhancement, we’ll add it to our growing list of ideas for future releases.
    4. Our file upload field is not meant for custom paths, but you can certainly upload any file type supported by your WordPress site through it. WordPress doesn’t support every file type out of the box, so you might want to follow up and check out how to extend WordPress to support additional file types here: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-add-additional-file-types-to-be-uploaded-in-wordpress/
    5. There’s an issue with our date field when it comes to the Year-only input, we just found this out about a week or two ago and we’re looking into a solution for this. You’ll be happy to know a fix for it will be included in an upcoming release ??
    6. What issue did you have with switching a field type from currency to a number field? That’s supported, so if there’s a bug there, we want to track it down and help fix it for anyone else who might be encountering the issue.

    We appreciate you supporting our plugin, we’re sorry you weren’t able to get it to meet all of your needs. We hope that you’ll consider changing your review based on what it does do and what it does currently support, versus the few bugs/enhancements you’ve notified us about. Our team puts a lot of effort into maintaining this project and a 1-star review like this feels unjustified compared to the amount of time we’ve spent with you in our live Slack support channel and due to the fact that half of your review is based on expectations of Pods that weren’t necessarily built-in yet or that were known to us up until this weekend.

    Thread Starter michaeljamisontttttttttttttt

    (@michaeljamisontttttttttttttt)

    To your credit, Pods did address most if not all of the issues I raised. It’s unfortunate that it took this review to finally get your attention, as I had diligently attempted to notify your team via slack but was dismissed as it was presumed that I was someone without enough knowledge to know a true bug from just not understanding the software. These issues cost me a good deal of time and frustration.
    While there is a rather large library of information on using pods, (which is quite remarkable for any plugin, let alone a free one) some of the documentation is outdated and/or has errors. This is frustrating.
    The single most significant lesson I learned-Saying you do need to use php to use pods, is not at all the same as saying you do not need to know and understand how to use PHP when using Pods.

    That said, Pods is a very useful plugin and the Pods team has put a lot of work into this.

    Plugin Author Jory Hogeveen

    (@keraweb)

    @michaeljamisontttttttttttttt

    One thing I do find strange, even if it doesn’t fit your needs 100% it seems you do appreciate the plugin and the effort that has been put into it.
    Maybe change the rating a bit? A one star review doesn’t seem very correct based on what you say about the plugin.

    Thread Starter michaeljamisontttttttttttttt

    (@michaeljamisontttttttttttttt)

    Yes, you’re right, and I have changed it. I might have done sooner, but I don’t often visit this page.
    My frustrations were not so much with the plugin itself, but with the authors and team’s refusing to acknowledge the flaws and document them, even though they knew of many of them. It wasted a great deal of my time.

    Plugin Author Jory Hogeveen

    (@keraweb)

    Great, WordPress and all the plugins on wp.org are 100% open source (and thus free) so I’d say none of them deserve a one star review (unless they contain spam or malicious code of course).

    I do understand the frustrations but every plugin has it’s strengths and limitations. Most important, every plugin has one or more dev’s that do their best to create something awesome.
    I’m sure that everyone would like to support everything but unfortunately there are too many different systems, dev’s and users that all request and do something different.

    Have a great day!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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