It works but has some challenges

  • We all love free plugins, especially ones that don’t charge a dime for “pro” versions or etc. This is one of those: it has some great features, and it is totally free.

    I will start with the positives to encourage further development, and then list some negatives.

    The positives are:

    • It does what it says, and presents one or more Gcal’s in a nice, clean, and fast way
    • The initial setup instructions are pretty good, and can usually get you going if you use Oauth for private calendar access
    • There are various display options that give nice flexibility
    • The caching feature is nice, reducing the API calls to Google

    For free, those are pretty nice. The downsides are several, though:

    • It only seems to operate correctly in Oauth mode, giving access from the wordpress site and all admins therein to All of the calendars on the connected account. I ended up spending a bunch of time using a secondary account that had the calendars I wanted shared to it (and publicly), to avoid potential breach of my private calendars in the main account. I would far prefer to have a supported option to access only public calendars via the API key, but I tried that several times and it would not work. (Plus, the docs say that’s “unsupported.”
    • It conflicts with several other plugins that use Oauth, including the well-written and supported “Use Your Drive” plugin and even Elementor Pro. Specifically, it blocks them from using Oauth to initially connect to external services. So this plugin has to be turned off to connect those, then it can be turned back on. While this is just a “minor inconvenience,” it took hours of wasted time to figure out what was going on. And then a support thread that was opened has been ignored for almost a week about that. Personally, I would rather pay for a plugin and get some real support, than have to wait for ??? amount of time for a fix to a problem like this.
    • If you want any control over the display beyond the default, the documentation is somewhat limited, though after the author’s response to my initial review I see there is a helpful examples page. This would solve some of the issues I had getting this to do what I need it to.

    This is a great plugin. Just beware, there is no upfront charge for this plugin, but if you value your time, there is a cost. It takes more to set up than the typical wordpress plugin (and I’ve set up 100’s over the past 10 years).

    There are no great alternatives (only one commercial alternative whose install immediately caused a conflict), and this plugin is the main show.

    So I’ll give it 4 stars. It’s great but not perfect.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Author michielve

    (@michielve)

    Hi,

    Thanks for the extensive review with some fair points. Let me address some of them:

    – “It conflicts with several other plugins that use Oauth…”: This is something that doesn’t sound good. I don’t use the plugins you mention so I haven’t experienced this myself. Do you know of a free plugin that I can use to replicate this issue?

    – “If you want any control over the display beyond the default, the documentation is very poor.”: I have some documentation at https://michielvaneerd.github.io/privategooglecalendars/ with different shortcode examples at https://michielvaneerd.github.io/privategooglecalendars/examples/ – did you look there?

    And something about the time to react: You are right that it can take some time for me to react. I do this in my spare time so I only work on this if I have the time for it. But if something is really broken I try to fix it immediately.

    @elevatingcreativity (Plugin User)
    “It works but requires effort and debugging” After having read this review your argumentation seems to be a joke.

    Complaining about a free plugin that may run into conflicts with a commercial theme (Pro) sounds ridiculous. Other ‘problems’ mentioned here, that I cannot either share. First, the slow ‘response time’ of the plugin’s creator shows a total different view at this forum. Second, the lack of ‘documentation’: there’s a dedicated documentaion site of this plugin. Maybe this guy is unable to read or don’t understand.

    We’re using this plugin for a long time and it does a great job. It’s stable and from update to update the functionality grows. The author is openminded to new ideas, quickly fixes bugs and is friendly. No doubt: a five star rating!

    Sorry, but my advice to you is:

    Just install the plugin, keep it or don’t keep it. Make a support call, wait for the answer. If there’s no answer or the answer ist not helpfull to you, just uninstall it. Do the community a favour by submitting code, or – if you think you could do better – write your own plugin (fork). But please, don’t waste our time by writing such nonsense to justify your rating. What a pitty.

    @michielve (Plugin Author)
    Keep forward developing this great plugin. I’m pretty sure this “great plugin has already started in a great future for a very long time“.

    Thread Starter elevatingcreativity

    (@elevatingcreativity)

    Wow @wordpress700108 nice attack! Thank you for making the wordpress community so friendly. It is people like you that spread kindness and peace on the planet, stop wars, and create peaceful politics all over the globe. And you do it all for a four star review, where I pointed out for prospective users that this plugin won’t always be easy to use. And I pointed out that I’d prefer to pay something for it if it could be better supported. Not all of us have time to troll the wordpress reviews and send hate (errr… I mean “love and kindness” of a very *unique* sort). Nor do all of us have time to debug plugins, rewrite code, etc.

    For someone who is considering the plugin, my review was far more honest than your diatribe, about the challenges they could run into.

    Yes it’s free. Yes it’s great. Is it five stars? No.

    Thread Starter elevatingcreativity

    (@elevatingcreativity)

    @michielve Thank you for your response. For your questions:

    – Oauth: unfortunately, I have only run into this problem with two very different paid plugins. If I run into it again, I’ll certainly let you know

    – About the documentation, I studied the first link you gave carefully, and also your demo website. However, I missed the examples page, probably because I thought the “examples” link on the top of the page was simply another ref to the shortcode example in the middle of that page. I am sorry for that, now I see there is a separate page of examples that would have helped tremendously. I will update the review about that.

    – I appreciate about the spare time issue. Plugins take a lot of time. This is actually why I prefer paid plugins, because the author can actually get paid for the time spent doing it and maybe pay more attention to it. Since this is not paid, I can’t expect rapid support. I understand that. However, it creates a more difficult user experience, when issues like the Oauth problems arise (that took me at least several hours to figure out the cause of the problem was this plugin). So I hope you are not upset that I still feel it is 4 stars – which is a pretty good but not “perfect” rating.

    I wish I had time to play around with the code to see if I could solve the problems, but unlike the other very rude poster here, I don’t have such time to play around. So I am stuck either living with it or waiting for a fix…

    Thank you for developing this, and I do hope you will keep it up!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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