absolute mess of a dated and overcomplicated plugin

Maybe TEC was good back in the day. Maybe…

A (more or less) straightforward of having an “event” custom post type with some “venue” and “organizer” meta and some ticketing/RSVP attached with their wingman tickets plugin. Maybe OK if you just want that and don’t care about the 1990’s design or funcionality, like a mom&dad website, but the good news stop there. It’s downhill from here.

From day one they overcomplicated this, going for linked custom post types rather than taxonomies for “venues” and “organizers”, creating an overwhelming modular approach (meaning hopping dozens of php files for a simple page template), dynamic loading CSS even if overridden, creating huge query payloads and unnecessary complexity.

It’s like Dr. Jeckill and Mr. Hyde, stick to the 1990’s design and functionality and you’re good to go, want something else and you have to hire a designer and a backend developer, there is no middle ground.
No easy way of editing templates, one has to loop through multiple php files, no easy css editing, once again css files are all over the place. Documentation is dated and does not reference current files (hint: check css customization vs the real files), template editing is a hit and miss because bock A is referenced by block B with css C overridden by D and with rules made by hook E. Tutorials are pretty much the same, with a touch of shallowness “let me show you how it’s done, just remove here, but will not say how to remove the obnoxious styles that remain after”.

And the “partner plugins” just follow the same approach, multiple loops, complicated ways of doing simple things, legacy over legacy files of dated ways of doing things. Worse than that, creating complexity over complexity rather than simplicity for solving things.

An example: Want to sell tickets for recurring events? You can’t (all the competition does it). You have to manually create events and tickets and then create a “series”, which, in turn, has it’s rules and it’s scattered around php files. The approach is to create a new problem rather than solving the previous (hint: due to the overcomplicated way they made this).

Another example: want to create an event that occurs in day X and Y from 9pm to 11pm (hint: the competition does it)? You can’t, it will show up as an event from day X at 9pm to day Y at 11 pm, put the details in the description and forget about calendar sync whit Google Cal or Outlok or anything else. Not the “premium” functionality their sales pitch talks about, more like small church website.

And hooks and filters? Overall, feels like a maze with hooks coming in and out at every version and things changing all the time, documentation is dated, no wonder one is recommended to have a staging site, next update will break your stuff.

Pretty sure this is hardcore developer nirvana, one looks into forum support requests in their site and the common answer is “hire a developer”, even for stuff their competitors do out-of-the-box.

Blocks support is painstackingly limited, of course, it’s an “oldtimer architecture”, no FSE whatsoever, some plans for that “in the future”. Bottomline, it’s old and trying to hold into it’s “oldness”.

From an outsider point of view, they live in and for their hostages, pardon, customers universe, where people are clinged in their past effort and investment and willing to pay for incremental functionality readilly available elsewhere. It makes sense, once you own the customer, you own the narrative, no matter how far away back in time it places them. Just milking the customer, which is OK unless you are the customer.

If, like me, you bought in the narrative, good luck. You will need it (or a backend devolper plus a designer).

If you are just getting started, take a look at other plugin options, see how easy or hard it is to customize them, how easy it is to change the archive layout or CSS, or to change the price link into a button, how to add multiple days or timeslots to an event (think “classes”), if it integrates with custom fields (in case you need something more) and how to make them appear in the frontend. How they integrate with woocommerce and what options are there. Ask question in their forums, ask how to do this and that. And do the same in TEC, so you can have an idea.

And then make your decision.

• This topic was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by apessoa.