Please Reconsider Some of the 2.0 Decisions

I have multiple plugins of my own, so I understand the challenges of making good updates and keeping everyone happy. It’s tough.

Following the update, I’ve had to roll back the two sites which I used Staffer on.

– The decision to break all permalinks to individual staff is really frustrating. People have spent tons of time building sites under the assumption of those links and tell people to create redirects is not an acceptable “solution.” This is also going to hurt the SEO of every site that uses the plugin.
– Relatedly, the modal is a pattern of UI I don’t like for Staff and I wouldn’t have ever selected this plugin if it had been that way in v1. An option to go back to single pages feels like must-add hotfix.
– There was no notice of breaking images (and other breaking changes) in the changelog. “Semantic versioning” doesn’t mean not communicating changes or allowing people to assume the upgrade will work smoothly. There should be much more complete descriptions and warnings, and it can still be added for those who haven’t upgraded.
– The fact that all styles are overridden in the new plugin and the layout essentially is “reset” (I went from 3 columns of people with no image to 2 columns with a placeholder image on one site) is just a terrible experience for the user. Worse, it’s going to cost my clients money.

Since the plugin was completely rewritten and there is no real upgrade path that doesn’t involve redoing work, I’d like to suggest you re-release 1.3.3 as the latest version and then release v2 as a new plugin (Staffer 2, maybe). The changes and lack of upgrade compatibility mean I plan to never upgrade and that is really sad and disappointing.

All of us plugin authors help each other when we make plugins that update smoothly and don’t cause problems for our users. Please really take the lessons of this release to heart and find ways to reduce the friction of future updates, hopefully quickly.

Thanks for building this plugins, and please restore the features that made me choose it in the first place.