Was great, now broken

  • This plugin was spectacularly useful until it was taken over by a new maintainer who broke backward compatibility and made formatting calendars incredibly convoluted. His changes should have been forked off to a new plugin.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Contributor Phil Derksen

    (@pderksen)

    I’m sorry the upgrade has (so far) not worked with your particular setup.

    As you can see with our activity we’re doing our best to improve the current version of the plugin. We’re working as fast as we can considering this is currently a free plugin we’re working on in our free time.

    A code rewrite was necessary for 2.0 as the original plugin hadn’t been updated since Dec 2012, so we’re working with a completely new architecture that is more maintainable going forward.

    As you can see in our support forums (https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/google-calendar-events), we made is as simple as possible to revert to the old version of the plugin when all else fails.
    https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/if-you-need-to-revert-to-0731

    In fact, you can download any particular tagged version.
    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/google-calendar-events/developers/

    www.ads-software.com allows no way to “fork” or otherwise easily maintain two different “current” versions of the same plugin, otherwise we would go this route.

    We appreciate any detailed feedback and suggestions you can give us in the forums, and although we may not respond immediately, we do read them all.

    Thread Starter eamondaly

    (@eamondaly)

    The problem with reverting is that for sites like mine which are set to auto-update, both I and my clients would have to jump through hoops to prevent this single plugin from updating. Even if I did so, they’d still see the nagging “updates availble” banner every day, which is less than ideal– I don’t like training people to ignore warnings.

    In my opinion, the better solution would have been to create an all-new plugin with a different name and let it compete on its own merits against GCE. It’s fairly clear in the forum that the majority of GCE users thought the original codebase was just fine as it was.

    To be clear, I’m grateful that you’re spending your time contributing to the WordPress sphere, and I appreciate the desire to take something you consider broken and rewrite it from scratch in the hopes of greater flexibility and better features down the line. I would just encourage you to consider less disruptive ways to do so in the future.

    Plugin Contributor Phil Derksen

    (@pderksen)

    Understood. Thanks for explaining.

    I also wish that there was an easier way to do this on www.ads-software.com without losing visibility and/or always showing the notification.

    We ran a beta testing period, warned folks, left instructions for reverting, and made it as easy as possible to revert.

    Other plugins sometimes have to do the same thing as well. I think it’s just the nature of the beast.

    Example:
    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/testimonials-widget/
    https://github.com/michael-cannon/testimonials-widget/blob/master/UPGRADING.md

    Along the same note, Google’s GCal API may be getting a breaking update soon as well. This might affect any code (old plugin or not) using it.

    In the end, I think we’re making progress getting important fixes applied gradually. Thanks.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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