New diagnostics in Simply Static – Not errors but warnings

  • Resolved jonalmada

    (@jonalmada)


    4 months ago

    To whom is may concern:

    I am curious why I am seeing the diagnostic “You need an SSL certificate to connect with external APIs like GitHib or Algolia.”

    I think this “error” is a mistaken assumption on the part of your developers. You are likely assuming we are IT businesses who are needing reminders to engage in best practices. Bully for you guys, but not everyone is in a large IT organization. Most of your users are likely small personal developers, content creators, or small to medium size organizations.

    I fall into the personal content creator camp. I do my development work locally on my home network and have no need to generate SSLs. I use Simply Static to generate my site and transfer it via SFTP. Hence, no need for SSLs.

    The assumption is that this is an error when in fact, it is a caution. I was very confused at first when I read this diagnostic and realized the intent after a little more study. I am a retired software developer from years back and suggest you consider the following:

    1. SSLs are not often used by developers on local home networks or freelance setups. It simply isn’t required. Yes, SSLs are “best practice” but not feasible in a lot of use cases in a private setup like mine. I run a WAMP server to do my development work and am NOT going to go through the nightmare of generating a local SSL to accommodate your plugin.
    2. This is not an “error” – It is a warning. I suggest you flag it was a warning only and allow us to not be hit with a red “error” message when, in fact, it is a warning. Change the color to yellow as a warning only and clearly state it is only a warning. Not an error.
    3. Like many warnings in applications, it would be nice to be able to see warnings with a link to the list of current issues, but to also have the right to turn warnings off in some manner so we are not being flagged with issues we either can do nothing about, or which we are aware of but choose to ignore.

    I love Simply Static and have used it for years… I realize you are evolving the product, but hope these suggestions of mine get your team thinking about who is using your product and how they use it.

    Sincerely,
    Jon Almada

    • This topic was modified 4 months ago by jonalmada.
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  • Plugin Author patrickposner

    (@patrickposner)

    Hey @jonalmada,

    thanks for taking the time to put so much thought into this!

    You are right on many levels. We have already started lowering the requirements to run Simply Static (and we continue to do so!).

    We are largely influenced by the feedback we receive (and IT and security companies seem to be the most active users in our user base).

    SSL Notification

    One thing I can already confirm is the removal of the SSL check within the next update.

    While it took us months to get to that point (and 1000s of lines of code), I understand that having an SSL certificate might be an issue for a considerable part of our user base.

    Warnings and Disabling Notices

    I still try to avoid adding a “disable this notice” feature.

    The problem is that many people reach out to us on various channels (GitHub, the forum, e-mail, DMs in Slack, etc.) without spending 5 minutes thinking about a solution themselves.

    While this was okay for years, we are now faced with hundreds (if not thousands) of messages every week, and we are still a super small team (four people and only two devs).

    So, the reason we are putting so much effort into the diagnostics and extending them is to give people a better idea of what we need to ensure their exports run as smoothly as possible while working behind the scenes to lower these barriers even more.

    Hosting Problems

    The number one problem was (and still is) hosting setups.

    I’m explaining WP-Cron almost every day to folks trying to export websites with 20k pages/files on a shared hosting provider – I would LOVE to give people an option to not deal with these things.

    At the same time, we try to stay free (or affordable with a pro) for many people and don’t move into expensive monthly plans like most competitors.

    To solve that, we need to be a bit nagging in terms of showing errors, automate as much as we can, and give our users as much help as possible (via tutorials, docs, and we even release an entire video course in a couple of weeks about Static WordPress).

    I know it’s not perfect for everyone, but we definitely try to keep a healthy balance between being a technical product and being a tool that can (theoretically) be used by everyone who is using WordPress!

    Have a great day and thanks again for your feedback,
    Patrick

    • This reply was modified 3 months, 4 weeks ago by patrickposner.
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