You are not serious

There are questions in the free version of the plugin as well.
Still waiting for a new plugin that works.

Hello @gilles24,

I’m very sorry that you feel frustrated. And even though you are asking in the support forum for free users about the paid version, I will happily reply to you here. In the future, I would appreciate it if you could use the official support channel used by all paying customers to clarify all the questions about paid versions of the PDF Embedder plugin. That’s not my ask, that’s the moderators of WP.org’s request (please see the WP.org Support Forum guidelines).

Firstly, we focused on the free version. We needed to completely rewrite it to be maintainable and extendable in the future (we released v4.7 in February). Only after doing that, we were able to start working on rewriting the paid version(s) of the plugin – because the paid one will now require the free version to be installed and activated. This alone is a big change (previously, you had to deactivate the free and activate the paid version).

In the past, there was a ton of code duplication and technical debt which was very hard to maintain. Hence those infrequent and sometimes buggy releases in the past. So we had to clean the code up, effectively rewriting everything from scratch. And while doing that we also needed to fix the majority of old bugs, while also preserving the backward compatibility. I bet you don’t want to update to the latest version and see that something isn’t working as expected. We have dozens and dozens of reports of bugs and enhancements logged that we are processing one by one.

So that’s why we do the work in stages:

• update the foundation – the free version (released as v4.7)
• rewrite the old premium and secure versions to be a single new premium that extends (and relies on to some degree) the free version (already done)
• test that new premium users will be aware of the new requirements of having Free to be installed (already done)
• test that old premium users do not lose their settings in plugin, shortcode or block (already done)
• fix and test as many bugs as can be done in a meaningful timeframe (we are here)
• make sure old premium users can actually automatically update to the latest version.

We are actively working right now on making everyone’s life much easier long-term, for both our users and customers (feature-rich and pleasant experience) and ourselves (easier new features creation, easier maintenance, etc).

And even though I understand, that this might not be the perfect answer you expect from us, that’s what it is. I would be thankful if you could find a bit more patience while we are cranking the final bits.

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Hello @procarmanuals,

Can you please outline which “questions in the free version of the plugin” you are referring to? I would love to get the feedback.

So far we didn’t have any reports about broken things in the free version with more than 120k sites already upgraded to v4.7 (according to WP.org data – 40% of our 300k+ active installations).

In a different support thread for our plugin, I see you had a question (which was more about the theme styling than the plugin misbehaving) and our support team member successfully helped you with a code snippet for your theme.

Confirmed, my client’s PDF Embedder Premium 5.1.4 was not working, at all. No noted plugin conflicts or PHP errors in the logs. I added CSS and JavaScript minification and caching exceptions on the iframe-embedded pages and then the PDF’s seemed to work dependably.

Hi Steven Ray

Why is the response I see here not at all the same as the one I received by email?

You say here that you added exceptions to resolve the problem… whereas on the response copy that was sent to me by email (which was therefore your first response before modification…), you say that you changed PDF viewer plugin…

I have tested the plugin work on your site, will indicate the problems and sent a message. You replied that the plugin is in development and will be released soon.
You have delayed the release date of the new version.

@gilles24 I did at first replace the plugin for ThemeNcode PDF Viewer for WordPress but then tried a different approach and the modifications did in fact solve the issue at least for now. Therefore I edited my post to the final conclusion versus the first attempt before the editing window timed out. Receiving a copy of each edit is the result when selecting “followup” on a comment.

Ok, I understand better.
But could you share the exclusions you made? that would be very useful.
THANKS.

@gilles24 I don’t use a cache package like W3 Total Cache?, WP Rocket, or WP Super Cache. I have found them to be like a hammer, too intensive. I use Cache Enabler, Autoptimize, and Async JavaScript in combination on all 75 of my websites. They are more than enough without breaking things. This combination allows exception rules to be entered as well as deselecting minification on the right page column while in admin editing mode. All caching plugins provide exception rules (enter URL link or post ID of the page to be excluded) that can be entered. I simply excluded the pages from caching and minification that the embedded PDFs appear in. A person does have to drill down to learn what options that their particular caching methodology offers. It is not as simple as an A-B-C bullet list to achieve. I think the PDF Embedder developers need to add a cache buster (disables caching on page with PDF embedded with a click) option in the settings.

Ok… I just did a test on a local test site, by deactivating the cache on a page integrating a PDF…
The rendering is always bad (the reader takes the entire width of the page, but the document does not fill the reader…).
So in my opinion it’s not just a cache problem…

@gilles24 Yes, I imagine not. I went back and checked the website with PDF’s and they are not loading again. I simply don’t have time to diddle with a buggy plugin. I reverted back to ThemeNcode PDF Viewer which works great as a flipper or iframe embedded viewer for other clients. It is not as clean as PDF Embedder, but it has never failed… so that is that.