.

Hi flx0,

I’m really sorry you had a negative experience with AWPCP here.

The code you reference above is definitely showing its age. That’s why 3 months ago we started a project to completely redo this plugin using custom post types, which as you put it is “the WordPress way”. The plugin originally dates back to 2007 and it was hard to go all in for a full rewrite. We finally bit the bullet last December and the project is still in progress. As you might imagine, converting an entire plugin that does what AWPCP does will take some time to get right, particularly since we also have to handle the migration of users from the “old way” to the “new way”.

Our performance tests indicate some different results from the ones you reference above. Performance with ANY plugin is very dependent on the hardware setup, hosting quality, bandwidth available, whether the DB is shared or dedicated and so on. It’s a complex matter, and it may be the case that your setup saw an 8 second increase, but without knowing more about what is going on, that’s not a fair assessment of things I’m afraid. Our own demo doesn’t show that slow down so it’s not necessarily a cut-and-dried issue.

We are well aware of how WP works and PHP’s best practices. But when you have a legacy code base, changes are generally incremental if you have 10,000 installed users to manage along the way. Big bang releases tend to upset folks, destabilize sites and cause tons of support requests. We are definitely working on it.

I didn’t see you posting any support issues, so if you ran into problems I’m sorry if there wasn’t a quick response on those. We’re here to help and happy to do so if you raise the issues with us. We have very responsive support in general and if you found something, we would have welcomed a discussion.

I hope you find a solution more to your liking and that better fits your needs. Best of luck to you.

Hi,
Thanks for your answer.

To be fair, awpcp is not the only source of problems here (even if it’s the main).
Bad decisions were made from the start, but I’ll not whine here about that.

Sorry to insist, but even you demo is slow.
You can see using an inspector tool that the server takes about 2s to answer a query.
It’s insanely slow for a demo site.
And I can say that in these 2s, 1.7s at least are due to AWPCP.
We have our own datacenter, a lot of wordpress sites, and the slowest ones are using AWPCP.

I know working on legacy code is hard and frustrating (I’m doing that all day).
That’s why a lot of projects are splitting into a legacy (bugfix only) and an actual version.

If your code is that old, you should also lower the price.
40$/site for extra fields or just COMMENTS ? Seriously ?
For a dozen of files containing obsolete code that will slow down everything ?

Also, for the documentation :
The back-end doc is perfect. A lot of screenshots, nice explanations… I like it.
But the developpers doc (“Advanced Customization”) is not enough to give a global view of how things works.

I know your support team is good. I didn’t post because I don’t have a specific bug, I just hate the structure itself (talking about code only, no problem with UI).

I’ll keep working with this because I’m not the one making decisions.
But I hope we’ll see a big update soon.

Thanks for responding.

Can you walk me through how you’re measuring the page load performance and how you directly attribute 1.7 of 2s to AWPCP? You indicate it’s not the only source of problems and I would agree with you. My measurements and my developer’s as well put it closer to about 20% of the total overhead of a call.

I’d really be interested in knowing how you’re measuring things here and what your specific results are. 2 seconds is hardly “insanely slow” for the internet. I would welcome more info on what comparisons you’re making with other sites and the plugins they run. AWPCP being a complex plugin has MUCH more to do than your average one like Yoast or a GA plugin, which is all on-page stuff for the most part. Also, consider that our migration to a custom post type will likely change the performance of things quite a bit, since we don’t have to use the custom data tables we have in the past, restructuring many queries.

Your assessment above sounds like you believe AWPCP is way better than just a 1-star review here, particularly since you:
– are actively using the plugin and will continue doing so
– consider our support to be responsive and ‘good’
– liked the documentation (‘back end doc is perfect’)

Many plugins in the repo lack 2/3 of those things, making them hard to use. Rating the plugin as 1 star solely based on the architecture of the code seems to be a bit unfair, wouldn’t you agree? If you would reconsider the review of the plugin as a whole and revise your review, I’d appreciate that particular since it doesn’t seem to be accurate.

Edited to a more constructive and politically correct review.
Added a star for your responsiveness.

Hi flx0,

Thanks for the revision. Just to clear up a few misconceptions in your review:
– Our developer documentation is pretty extensive, talking about the hooks and filters, file structure and other stuff and it’s available here: https://awpcp.com/documentation/customization-guide/

– The code is being reworked now to be a full custom post type, so it’s not going to be “obsolete” anymore…

– I’m not sure what you mean by “no child theme support” because we’re a plugin and plugins don’t have any child theme support for them. That’s for themes.

– We do play pretty well with most plugins and if there’s a conflict, we’re happy to address it directly. The combinations of PHP, WordPress version, themes, plugins and installed libraries make it impossible for us to test all potential configurations. If you can be more specific about the ones you’re having issues with, we’d be happy to take a look. We’re always interested in making the plugin better. In our experience, a lot of plugins introduce JavaScript conflicts because of poor includes, duplicate libraries and such. We strictly follow the WP conventions and make sure we don’t do any of those things, but not everyone is as diligent.

– Over 60% of the plugins in the repository are abandoned or have no support or maintenance. By purchasing the premium modules from us, it allows us to continue development and provide the great support you noted above. We’ve been around since 2009 and plan to continue for a long time. Not many plugins get to say that.

We’re a good fit for some folks but not for everyone. Thanks again for taking the time to comment.