good but be prepared for customisation issues

  • This is a very good plugin in many ways. If you want something that just works and has a lot of slick features, it’s great.

    If your project would involve a lot of customisation, do some tests first.

    On the one hand, generally the code is done well, with a lot of hooks and a good templating system. Support requests are generally dealt with thoroughly.

    However, I ran into a few very intractable issues involving clashes between our requirements and the plugin’s idiosyncrasies. Debugging ended up eating up quite a bit of time. I think in the end we definitely still saved a lot of time over coding something from scratch, but not as much as I thought.

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  • Hey Steve, I know it’s been about a week but I wanted to follow up with you directly here to thank you for this review. I am honestly stoked to see such a well-thought, crafted response, even if it falls short of being the five-stars we love seeing. i’m used to seeing reviews on one end of the spectrum or another, so the fact that you awarded three stars shows you put some intentional thought in here. Thanks for that!

    I really appreciate the kind words on the quality of our code. We do put a lot of effort in there to make sure we keep things as clean and nimble as possible, so it’s awesome that you’ve taken notice to it.

    Admittedly, customization is something we struggle with and debate (healthily) about often on the team here. We’ve taken a stance to make The Events Calendar as un-opinionated as possible, whether it be in styles or functions, so it has the best chance of working with as many themes as possible, while providing the flexibility a developer like yourself might hope for with a wide variety hooks, filters and other functions.

    That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement. In fact, we designed the plugin specifically for developers like yourself and would love to know if there were any specific pain points you ran into that we should be considering. At end of the day, we want this plugin to make your job easier rather than harder, so please feel free to let us know.

    It’s darn kind of you to give us such a fair review in light of the frustrations you likely encountered and, again, I really appreciate any feedback you’re willing to provide so we can get a better idea of how developers are using the plugin and where it can be more flexible for these types of customizations.

    Cheers and thanks for your support!
    Geoff

    Thread Starter Steve Taylor

    (@gyrus)

    Thanks for your feedback Geoff.

    Assessing different plugins, TEC stood out for its developer community and the extent of its hooks – generally, these are really good. I admit it’s possible we were just unlucky, and happened to hit some of the few real snags that exist. If so, I guess it pans out – most people won’t hit these snags and will give 4-5 stars, and your average will be fine. Looks like this is the case! ??

    Here’s the threads we started while working on this project, maybe you can get a better picture from these:

    https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/users/publiclife/support/topics/

    Your support staff were generally very good BTW. I did appreciate the depth they were prepared to go to in getting to the bottom of things, even though it took a while sometimes.

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