Confusing company politics

I’m a customer of Astra Pro theme by Brainstorm Force. If you use Astra Pro with just Gutenberg and no page builder (which I do since I dislike page builders) you got recommended towards installing and using UAGB, a plug-in developed by the same company. Iirc some of the Astra starter templates even prompted you to install it. I decided to use UAGB since it seemed meant as a bundle for Astra users and I assumed it would prove more reliable compared to combining Astra with third party block libraries with similar functionality. Now UAGB always worked very nicely and I never had any issues.

Then apparently there was a decision to discontinue UAGB, rebrand it and replace it with Spectra which was technically done by making Spectra an UAGB update that was supposed to update deprecated blocks automatically. This did not work well and broke lots of sites. The biggest issues arose from the much-used ‘advanced columns’ block which is basically the main design/building block for sites made with Gutenberg+UAGB being deprecated and breaking. Now I don’t mind innovation and updates or errors happening and Spectra does look very nice though I haven’t tried it yet. It’s just that the communication wasn’t great and indicated that Brainstorm Force do not understand what usage their own products are suggesting and how they are used.
I never received any e-mail or WordPress notification announcing the conversion from UAGB to Spectra with a warning about updating with caution.
The response to the many reports of broken sites was not great and seemed like it wanted to blame users for development oversights:
1) Users got told that they should be grateful for the free service provided for a free plug-in when lots of them were probably Astra customers like me who did not understand that they should treat UAGB as a separate product from Astra with all the risks of a separate third-party plug-in.
2) Users were also told that there was an extensive open beta (nobody knows how testers were selected, I’ve never heard about it myself) and that not everything could be tested for which is some weird goalpost-moving. I think nobody wants and expects everything to be tested but there seemed to be an issue with prioritizing core functionality here and whatever caused this never got explained – my theory is that there was incomplete understanding of actual UAGB use but we’ll probably never know. To me it seemed like they really missed to test for backwards-compability with sites build with the advanced columns block because the issues people experienced weren’t due to some special set-ups they had.

tl;dr: If you’re looking to use this plug-in for a professional website be aware of such issues, be careful with updates and make sure you have the maintenance windows and resources this might require

• This topic was modified 2 years, 2 months ago by saskia85393.