Honest feedback regarding your latest releases

  • Resolved Yordan Soares

    (@yordansoares)


    1 year, 3 months ago

    Hello,

    First, let me start telling you that I have being a big fan and promoter of your plugin through the years. However, I have some remarks regarding your coding practice that, in my opinion, were not well applied or not following what I consider good practices.

    We added some time ago a custom setting to the snippet edit screen, using the code_snippets/admin/single which was working up to v2.14.6, but then it was deprecated on v3.0.0, in favor of code_snippets_edit_snippet, which was not mentioned in your changelog, so we had to discover this unforeseen change.

    However, since v3.4.0 you have completely removed not only the action hook, but the php/views/edit.php page altogether, when you converted the edit snippet screen into React (here), again, without mentioning anything about the removal of the code_snippets_edit_snippet action hook. Therefore, now our integration is completely disconnected because there is nowhere to hook up.

    At this point, I’m a bit disappointed about lack of transparency and bad practices regarding the plugin extending, since removing action and filter hooks is something which breaks custom code, that your users (like me) may not notice for some time.

    My first impression is that you are restricting developers from editing features that were already present in their free version, in favor of using their Pro version. Maybe I’m wrong, but you can’t blame me for thinking this way, after the mentioned above.

    I hope my feedback is useful for you, so you improve not only your changelog reports, but also your coding standards.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Shea Bunge

    (@bungeshea)

    Hi Yordan,

    First of all, I want to say that I really appreciate this feedback. As a development team, we are fairly small and insular, and so receiving suggestions and responses from users themselves is immensely valuable for shaping our decision making and direction.

    I also feel like I should apologise for how these changes have affected your workflow. As a developer, I haven’t really received the impression that there are any, if any, users taking advantage of the action hooks we have in the plugin, and so I haven’t put as much effort as perhaps I should in documenting those changes between major versions. If proper developer documentation is something there’s a demand for, then it’s definitely something I’d like to prioritise and ensure that it is complete and useful.

    Converting the edit page to React was a bit of a large process, and unfortunately I did end up needing to remove some action hooks, as there doesn’t seem to be a one-to-one equivalent that allows for such easy extensibility when working in JavaScript as there is in PHP. You’re correct that I should have documented this better, as I said above, but I also wasn’t really aware that there was anyone making use of those hooks besides our own internal uses.

    I would definitely love to try to work out a solution here. As I said, I’m not really sure how to achieve the same level of extensibility in the new React UI as could be easily achieved with do_action in PHP, but I’m sure we can work out *something* that ensures your integration works with the latest plugin version and will continue to do so into the future.

    Thread Starter Yordan Soares

    (@yordansoares)

    Hi @bungeshea,

    Thanks for providing more context on the changes you have made to the plugin.

    First, I think I owe you an apology for writing in an upset mood. I think frustration got the better of me and I inadvertently took it out on you.

    Second, it took me a while to respond to your comment, because I was talking to a colleague to get feedback from him, but we haven’t gotten enough time to address this with the new Code Snippets structure.

    While I have some PHP skills, I know next to nothing about React, so I think adapting our personal extension right now is simply not possible for me.

    If you’re wondering, the extension we developed is a connector between your plugin and Gist (from GitHub), to keep a backup of all the interesting code snippets we write over time, so we can reuse it always we have a similar issue/need. This could be a nice feature in your Pro version ??

    Plugin Author Shea Bunge

    (@bungeshea)

    I’d definitely be interested in knowing more about your extension – perhaps I could figure out a way to get it working with the new page structure?

    If it’s hosted in a public GitHub repository or something, I’d definitely appreciate being able to take a look.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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