Great Support, Buggy Plugin

First, the good: This plug in comes from WPMUDEV, where I’m a member, so it has great chat support. I like this group so much I tend to overlook flaws in their products and hate to say anything bad. Also, Memberships 2 works in a sophisticated and elegant way when it’s working properly. Lack of support is my number one complaint about WordPress plugins and themes, and this one, because it’s part of my membership, has that locked up. I can get someone on chat 24/7.

Now, the bad.

Honestly, I would have given 2 stars instead of 3 if not for what’s mentioned above. There are a few major bugs. Case in point: When I first set this up, about half of the test memberships I created said they were expired even though the expiration date was December of 2018. I couldn’t figure out what the difference was between the first set (the ones that worked and showed active) and the second. Neither could the folks at WPMUDEV. I finally discovered that, though you are allowed to change the person from visitor to paid member on the users list, if you do, they come up as expired. The only way they will show as active members is if you create an invoice and go through the process of marking it paid. Which is fine. But you have to do it in that order. If you mistakenly mark them a member on the list, then try to go create and invoice and pay it, you might as well just delete the user and start over. This is clearly not how it’s supposed to work, or else why would I be able to mark them as an active member on the list at all? It’s not fixed (even though I reported this bug months ago), by the way, so if you encounter the problem, remember this post.

That’s just one of the funky issues I’ve come up against. I’ve seen boxes that I just checked uncheck themselves when I hit “save changes” and things that were working fine just stop working. The support staff has been very good at helping me through them, but should you have to spend so much time talking to them? I don’t think so.

BOTTOM LINE:
– Sophisticated, smart plug in;
– Buggy – it feels almost like it hasn’t been fully tested.

I haven’t gotten that far into it yet because we’re a new organization and don’t really have a lot of members or much protected content at this point, but I kept getting prompted to review, and since I spent at least an hour on with tech support last night, I figured I’d say something. I will update when I’ve “broken it in” more.