Nice in some respects, but compatibility and management an issue

Have used Layers for about a year, but am moving off it. Here’s why.

Doesn’t work properly with Easy Digital Downloads. You can’t use the product currently via the Layers Dashboard. You have to deactivate EDD. You CAN use it via Appearance, Customize, but that’s a pain. The company was unresponsive when I reported this. If you’re an EDD user, keep this in mind.

I purchased the Koel Theme, which is built on Layers. There are issues. Twice content widgets on my site’s home page have disappeared into the ether. Of course, each side points the finger at the other, but the fact remains I’ve started to approach Layers like it’s a bomb waiting to blow up my site.

The system, at least on my site, doesn’t allow me to add columns to widgets, In theory, you can add up to 12, but I can’t. I can REMOVE columns, but add them back, no. Undoubtedly a conflict with some other plug-in, but Layers seems to have a few too many of these.

The widgets it’s created are very nice in many respects, but limited in others. Image insertion, for example. Layers doesn’t use the WP editor so if you want to insert images in, say, a table, you have step out of the system, then cut and paste back into a content box. Doable, but a real pain.`

The company did something truly stupid, and scary. It dropped a chat system onto my site as part of an upgrade WITHOUT warning anyone. All of sudden, a big blue button appeared in the lower right hand button of my site. When I inspected it, it said it was Intercom for WordPress. I had NOT installed it. For a few brief unhappy minutes, I thought my site had been hacked somehow. And Intercom does not have a sterling rep:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/view/plugin-reviews/intercom-for-wordpress?filter=5

Three reviews and one of them a one star. And that one star is a doozie.

This “Chat” program does nothing when you hit it. It’s supposed to connect to Layers, I guess, but it does nothing. It’s just there. You can turn it off, but I’m very uncomfortable with someone installing a com program that goes out of my site which does nothing and showed up without warning. The company CEO was not happy with the fact that I was not happy about having the crap scared out of me and snarked when I told him I was one click away from buying the “Pro” version but stopped when I saw that Big Blue Unknown Button show up unannounced that he didn’t have to worry because Layers is “free.” (Yes, they did announce it would always be free, but that didn’t count for the “Pro” version. Yes, a bit sneaky, but companies DO have to make money. I can understand that.)

I was not happy with that response and told him it was a stupid thing to say and a silly way to behave. If you aren’t disturbed by unknown stuff showing up on your site, you are the type of person who WILL be hacked. And that chat program STILL does nothing and I really don’t want it on my system at this point.

At which point the CEO of the company grandly announced he wouldn’t tell me about the button, the issue with EDD, why I can’t add columns back into a widget, etc because I had offended him.

And that’s it for me and Layers. I’ve built two sites with it, will use the free version for the time being, but over the next few months will analyze the other builders and move off it.

Those are my experiences. Yours may differ.

PS. Add the following program to the incompatibility list, Restrict Content Pro, same publisher as EDD. You cannot create a Layers page and embed the short code for the subscription page on a Layers Page.

Over time, these incompatibilities lead to a mixed state of Layers/regular pages on your site and the constant turning on/off of plugins to get anything done.

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