Needs a Rework

This plugin does the basics of what it’s suppose to do doesn’t do them that well.

The current customer care center in pilot press is rather lacking. Not only is a bit cluttered containing so many different things (invoices, subscriptions, change password, change email, update payment info) it does a lot of things that just don’t fit with modern web standards.

For starters why are you using the standard confirm/eval as popups to do anything? These functions are typically meant for very low level application stuff like a WordPress wp-admin area since they will never be seen by clients. Instead you should really have inline error messages with errors below form fields.

See something like Foundation’s Abide JS . These kind of messages are much cleaner and nicer for clients to read, can be made responsive, and your phone won’t warn you about popups from this browser. After clicking the button twice my phone immediately asked me if I want to prevent popups from this site.

Next, while we’re in the center having payment methods open a completely new browser window is just bad. This is just something you shouldn’t be doing. First it ties my hands not just to your markup, but also your styles. At least with the rest of the center I can override styles to sort-of get things looking the way I want but with that payment area I’m completely out of luck. I’m stuck with your very limited header image, background color, foreground color options. This means this part of the customer center will be completely off brand for customers. It also means the customer is going to notice a complete url change. “Whoah why am I on something called forms.ontraport.com all of a sudden” the client asks. This tends to lower peoples confidence in something when you just change site urls like this (especially something collecting credit card info).

Furthermore why can’t we just keep them on site? I honestly think you guys should rewrite this as a proper modal or heck maybe even a sub page that makes use of an API to fetch and update the payment info rather than hosting this directly on your forms.ontraport.com domain. Furthermore, that popup window isn’t responsive on mobile. Opened on my phone to find the forms are incredibly small to the point of not being legible.

Also since we’re on forms. The login form just submits directly to wp-login.php . No checks, no error messages, just redirect to wp-login.php. Meaning I need to completely brand this page and people get kicked off of wherever they were. Once again I’d really rethink this and maybe implement some js based calls to check for login errors and the like and show nice error messages in the form you are in rather than just sending them to the WordPress backend login area.

But I suppose this brings me to the final point….. why no html overrides? See something like WooCommerce. While not perfect the system uses a set of templates included with the plugin and adds lots of filters/actions to let you gracefully replace little bits as you need to. And if you’re a power user you can actually override the templates altogether in your custom template. This gives power users a lot of needed control over templating and user experience, allowing them to brand these parts of the site to meet the rest of their design standards.

Then even the editor pieces for inserting forms/media etc don’t seem to work for me and there are lots and lots of plugin conflicts, with really no room to make them work together since there are almost no filters/actions to hook into.

Furthermore, majority of functions are shortcodes so even if you want to do checks in code you need to use the shortcode calls since the developer decided to write the majority of the plugin into one great big file rather than breaking down in a few smaller files each focussed on a particular feature.

As it stands Pilot Press just feels kind of below standards vs OntraPort platform itself. The main OntraPort app feels and works great. It feels modern, but the Pilot Press plugin almost feels like a legacy feature that was forgotten rather than the main go to plugin for integrating OntraPort into WordPress.

Personally I’d recommend using a different plugin for integrating OntraPort or just directly calling their api yourself rather than trying to use this plugin.