Far from ready

Ignition Deck is a decent stab at a crowdfunding platform, but this plugin is SOOOO far from ready in a production environment. Still, I’ll try to make this review as helpful as possible for those who might be considering using the free version or spending any money on the pro version.

First, I agree with previous commenters, there’s not much the free plugin can do. It really serves just as a backbone framework for the pro or enterprise features. It’s fairly useless on its own and doesn’t really integrate with many themes other than the themes provided by the company for a fee. Shortcodes can be used to make this work with your theme, but you’ll find those hard to understand and employ as well.

The pro plugin is not much more useful at this point either, unfortunately. I purchased the enterprise version at a price of more than $300, which would make it the most expensive crowdfunding platform on the market.

There are fields in project creation that are not usable, but cannot be removed from the post type or the front-end view. Project documentation is poor, at best, and in some cases does not actually reflect the most recent version of the product. This makes it confusing to read documentation on the site, which you will undoubtedly need to do to figure this product out, while referring back to what you see on the admin panel.

Setup is extremely complicated. Enterprise version takes at least two plugins, and as many as 3 to get working correctly. Separate settings are required for it function properly. Again, these settings are not simple settings and descriptions for their use are not well documented.

For those looking to use this as a crowdfunding option where front-end users submit projects – you’re in for even more work and confusion. Projects cannot be automatically approved. That means a front-end user must first register on the site. Get wordpress details, login, go to a user dashboard and then change his or her profile to be allowed to create a project. This is so much work I doubt that anyone other than the most savvy internet user will be able to figure this out.

Once that creator button is checked the person then needs to create a project which takes them to a front-end project creation form. There are more fields here which are either not needed or serve no real function, like ship date, and project levels. Levels, in particular, cannot be removed and without them the project also cannot be saved.

Developer’s suggestion is to create a level with a $1 minimum price, thereby creating a level on the front-end project of $1, which is further confusing for potential donors and project funders.

Developer is active in support forum, but expect a 2-3 day response time on your questions if they involved more than perfunctory actions already described in documentation.

There are MANY, MANY, MANY items of this plugin that need to be further developed before I would consider using this in a production environment for myself or with a client’s website.