Clearly powerful, but with some disappointment

First off – this is not intended to be a wholly negative post. It’s clear that the plugin is EXCEPTIONALLY powerful… however, during testing of the plugin I came across three areas which IMHO should be addressed.

My hope was to speed up my workflow when creating property listing sites, as ATM we build from the ground up using ACF. However…

1) Clucky documentation … it takes a while to search the docs to find how to’s or why something is not working as expected. overall, on-site documentation in parts can be so sparse, we had to revert to Facebook groups or Reddit to find the answers we needed.

2) Page builder centric … We predominantly use either the Kadence or Blocksy Pro themes, alongside Guttenberg blocks including block plugins from Kadence, Stackable etc. But its seems to be able to create something truly unique (visually) you have to use either Divi, Elementor or Bricks. While we do have a Elemento Pro licence, we have not built a new site with it since 2022, and we’re actively pushing what remaining clients we have using Elementor over to Block-based designs, hopefully by the end of 2025. We could create our own theme and script our own dynamic blocks, but that defeats the point of switching to speed up our workflow.

3) Could not get Google maps API to work. I’m sure it’s a problem at our end, but we could not figure out what was going wrong, and searching the docs (point 1) became a PITA. It frustrates as we can connect using ACF or the Easy Property Listings plugin we’ve tested side by side.

Overall, we could live with point 1, most plugins/themes are poorly documented (Kadence)… but to not natively support blocks or even the WP code dynamic block is truly disheartening, for such a powerful feature rich plugin…

As it stands, we can recreate most of the features Hive offers with ACF/SCF and some customisations. But it take use approx 200 man hours…. This could have cut that down to 10 to 30 man hours.

Hopefully, Hive will address the lack of block support in the future. Or have a solution for using the dynamic block, that we have missed.