I wish I hadn’t already invested so much

If you’re wondering which calendar plugin to use – pick ANY OTHER ONE. I started using this plugin years ago when it seemed like the best option. By now I’ve paid well into the four figures in yearly subscription fees for some of their “pro” components on a few websites – which I wouldn’t mind if their software actually seemed worth it! But it’s bloated and slow and does NOT play nicely with other plugins. It’s caused so many headaches and so much wasted time.

I’m finally writing a review because I now need to be able to sort the Events by “Date Published” – which SHOULD be a very simple built in functionality. WordPress posts and pages already have this built in. But NOPE – The Events Calendar does not allow this. Going down a rabbit hole, I found out that they made a separate plugin you have to add to sort their events by the posted date… Not ideal, but okay, I went with it… Only to realize their “Advanced Post Manager” plugin doesn’t actually DO anything expected after activation. The plugin page says the directions are in an html file in the plugin folder, so I navigated to that file in the WP Admin dashboard via the plugin file editor… And it pulled up a rambling document that tries to rationalize why you will now have to add your own custom code to sort by date, along with some very unclear and confusing directions on which code you should add and how.

Quick recap – basic plugin has very limited functionality. Pay for any upgrades, and you’ll feel committed, and then it snowballs into adding more and more plugins for even the simplest basic functionality. Want to sort events by post creation date? NOPE! Modern Tribe says I have to add another one of their plugins to do that. Does adding yet another plugin actually fix the issue? NOPE – it just provides instructions for how to add my own code to a separate file to make it work, with the rationale that it’s “for developers”.

Sorting posts by date posted shouldn’t take over an hour, but that’s how EVERYTHING goes with this developer. Nothing is simple or intuitive because they keep adding workarounds and custom tweaks instead of following any best practices or expected wordpress standards. It makes things slow, troubleshooting is a nightmare, and it creates conflicts. Ongoing maintenance is a tangled nightmare.

My advice? Stay far, far, far away from this plugin author.