Excellent Plugin and Support

Update: As I’ve used the plugin more, I’ve discovered its shortcomings and quirks. There are too many to mention here. Keep in mind that much of the coding is non-WP standard and customizations can be difficult.

I tried several membership plugins before this one and was severely disappointed. Participants Database (PDB) has by far the best features in its free version and upgrades for the optional features are reasonably priced.

And the support is excellent, too. The developer responded very quickly to my support requests and even produced an updated version of the User Profile addon to accommodate my high school reunion website’s needs. He added the ability to create usernames in various styles. For my site, I needed names like john.doe. It works like a charm.

In a future version, I’d like to see better handling of custom templates. I created a custom template for the User Profile addon and placed it in the User Profile templates directory. It was deleted when the plugin updated.

I’d also like to see an easy way to add custom fields to the WordPress profile. For example, many of the female students from my high school class are married and have different last names. So I created a Married Name field in Participants Database. But it only shows with other PDB fields, not with the WP profile fields in the Profile tab.

I like the list display. It’s highly customizable in settings and visually pleasing. I bought the tabs addon and like that as well. It keeps things organized and was easy to set up and use.

In addition, the available documentation and example code snippets are head and shoulders above that of most plugins. There are hundreds of code snippets on the developer’s GitHub and in the online documentation.

Most of all, I like the stability and maturity of PDB. Unlike some other plugins, it hasn’t caused any “white screen of death” problems and creates no noticeable performance hit.

All in all, Roland has done and continues to do an excellent job with Participants Database. Kudos!

• This topic was modified 1 year, 6 months ago by Ed G. Reason: Updated based on more experience