Simple, effective, clean

Hey there, Geoff from Modern Tribe here — I just saw this review and wanted to follow-up, to both thank you for your honest assessment, and to see if I could get some more information from you on your comments here. It’s rare that we get reviews here that aren’t 1 star or 5 stars since most users seem to have strong reactions and go one extreme or the other. Seeing you gave a 4-star rating despite the shortcomings you noted really is appreciated.

We’ve been doing a lot of work on shortcodes lately and are still trying to find ways to make them better, and I was wondering if you might be willing to share some light on your experience. What kind of event widgets would you find useful that aren’t currently included? What additional shortcodes would you like to see and how would you use them? For example, would you like to see a shortcode for displaying the full Month View on any page or post and, if so, what sort of control would you like to have with it?

Totally understandable if you’re uninterested in providing that level of feedback or don’t have time. But if you’ve got a second we’d appreciate it and would take it into account as we work to improve the plugin. Our goal is to make the plugin more useful to all our customers…and if we can earn a full 5 stars from folks like yourself along the way, that’d be a nice added bonus. But more than anything I’d love to chat and hear your thoughts so we could spare others your disappointment down the road.

Either way: thanks a ton for the honest assessment and feedback so far!

Hi Geoff. Apologies for the delay in replying.

Does anything deserve a 5 star rating? That would make it perfect and never in need of developing – and a bit boring too ?? I could’ve given an extra half star maybe

I really like the plugin. For a free plugin, it does an amazing job without fuss. I think my complaint more relates to the way WordPress handles things and perhaps to an extent, developers are bound by those rules. I am relatively new to WordPress. I have used ExpressionEngine for a long time and still prefer it personally but have taken up WordPress because that is what some clients insist on. One of the things I love about EE is the different way they use templates and the fact that I can easily build my own templates using ordinary html with php if I want and I can put my content (including dynamic content) anywhere I like. I can’t do that easily in WordPress. I know I can do it by digging into WP templates and php but I don’t want to do that and I kind of resent having to do it just to place content where I want. Eg: I know from investigating that the month view in The Events Calendar is very responsive and will ‘minify’ nicely into something very closely resembling the mini calendar available as a short code in Pro (nice job on that btw) . But I can’t take the month view and stick it in a sidebar or a 50% column or a footer- at least not easily. In fact, I can’t really put a calendar where I want at all, only a list of events in a widget. The typical WordPress plugin behaviour of giving some plugins a default path e.g.: /events or /forums without enabling me to easily create and specify a custom template (emphasis on easily – I know it is possible) is really annoying and counterintuitive to me.

I don’t object to paying a premium for a great plugin at all and am going to spring for a Pro licence this week for my current project as I need recurring events and I really want that mini calendar. To make the free version really great for me I really just want the ability to control exactly where I place my content. Even just two short codes, one for a list of events and one for a calendar would be brilliant.

Thanks for the response. I hope this helps.

Tim