Terrible system – run far away

Dear Howard Short,

Thanks for your feedback!

You posted this one-star review one hour after you sent your support request… that I have just answered with solutions to every question you had.

Maybe you don’t like the new system and that’s okay. But posting this review without giving us the chance to answer your question is not fair play.

You might check my answers and see that we have not abandoned anything. Before you post other reviews like that on other free plugin pages, give them the chance to respond first.

Regards,
Simon [WPCasa]

Hello Simon,
Thank you for responding here.
I gives me hope that there may be a way forward for us with WPCasa.

But a few points first:
This was not a “free plugin” for us. We paid good money for the original WPCasa and additional themes.

4 months ago (not one hour) we were told by your support to wait to switch to the new system until the complete features were available (see below). We have not been informed otherwise.

Described by your own website:
“The theme framework version of WPCasa will no longer be developed. But we will still support it during the first quarter of 2016 (ends on March 31).” After that period, however, no more updates will be published and we will entirely concentrate on the development of the new plugin version.

“If you purchased the WPCasa & All Child Themes package, you’ll additionally get a developer license for all the themes. This license will be valid for 6 months and can optionally be renewed at a discounted price.”

From a support email February 22 (Tim) : A map for custom queries is currently not included. Will be added in the future. You can wait with the switch to the plugin version until it’s available.

Unfortunately (as far as I can tell) you haven’t actually implemented the functionality that was in the old system and are dropping support before its available. A large reason we selected the WPCasa theme was the built in map displays for available/sold properties.

It will take a lot of time to recreate the look of the old site based on one of your old themes. Why didn’t you make migration simple and update the existing themes to work with the new system, rather than creating entirely new ones? Now we have to do the work all over again.

Even so, some of the basic functionalities (like map displays of listings) still aren’t there and your 6 month upgrade path has run out.

Your prior themes at least had a “themes options” panel and built in custom css which we relied on heavily to create the look and feel required. Your new system has no theme options panel and uses the very limited theme “customize” and you suggest we add another plugin to manage custom css (no problem but not including it just adds one more plugin). The core css of the older version was superior in font weights and choices, the new themes will require even more customization.

I overstated when I said “no ability to move a site forward to their new plugin system”.
With a live site that has new listings added daily switching to the new system is very problematic, time consuming and expensive. As outlined by your own support document:
https://docs.wpsight.com/article/wpcasa-legacy/

We are stuck having to negotiate this transition as there is a heavy investment in it with time and money. Perhaps you’d like to take this discussion offline and help?

Hello Howard,

I’ve answered your support request. So I will only respond to some points here.

This was not a “free plugin” for us. We paid good money for the original WPCasa and additional themes.

And that’s exactly why I do not understand why you don’t leave your rant with us at support while this free plugin does not have anything to do with your issues.

Your prior themes at least had a “themes options” panel and built in custom css which we relied on heavily to create the look and feel required. Your new system has no theme options panel and uses the very limited theme “customize” and you suggest we add another plugin to manage custom css (no problem but not including it just adds one more plugin).

With a separate plugin like Simple Custom CSS your CSS is even safer than with anything that is saved through a theme options panel. These option panels were invented because WordPress did not offer something to handle these settings. But now they do. We are moving away from theme option panels because we go the WordPress way with the core theme customizer.

The core css of the older version was superior in font weights and choices, the new themes will require even more customization.

That’s maybe your estimation. But it’s just not true… and I built them both. But you probably refer to the Bootstrap CSS our old themes were based on. The next themes we will release, will be based on Bootstrap again.

I overstated when I said “no ability to move a site forward to their new plugin system”.

No, you overstated with your childish title like “Terrible system – run far away”.

Perhaps you’d like to take this discussion offline and help?

Why didn’t you ask before leaving a one-star review with this title?

Hi Simon,
I’ve replied privately as well but if you’d like to keep the conversation going here as well that’s fine with me.

We received an email demanding over $100 euro’s to continue the support for WPCasa, the new system based upon a “free” plugin that charges for all the functionality that the theme we already paid for included.

This is still while your own support emails indicate the system is not complete. Four months after telling us the map features were imminent your email from two days ago still says “Next month we will release a new version of our Listings Map add-on that will be able to show the listings of the current page. That means on the sold listings page it will show just the sold listings etc.”

This is a basic function in the original theme and was a main purchasing feature for us. You implemented the new system in haste and cut off support too fast and are now charging even more to retain the features we had.

I’ll leave it to those who bother to read this thread to investigate themselves.
I will say, however, your support has been quicker (if not actually answering the problems) since my “childish title”.

I’m hoping there is actually a resolution for us in the near future and we can properly migrate the full functionality of the theme and additions we had originally into the new system.