Matured plugin concept, robust, great features – but maybe not for everyone!

  • Since its beginnings I watch the development and “growing up” of the Jetpack plugin.

    In general I was amazed from the beginning of what it could/ can do. And to be honest, this plugin suite has really matured in the last years and months. Without any doubt!

    However, I have some (only in some areas of this whole plugin!) issues with Jetpack here and there. Being this the privacy stuff or other smaller things.

    Overall I give this review here for the achievement of the whole team over all these years. They’ve done amazing things that are especially useful for bloggers!

    Also for developers new features were added or existing revised, so the Jetpack team listened to its critics, myself included. I wanted to give my full respect for that – congrats Jetpack team!

    My experiences with their developers and support staff is only positive, they care about their “baby”, ahem product! ??

    I may rarely use it, but as time went by I even developed an add-on plugin for Jetpack and even translated it into German in a full translation “in one stream”. My hope is that others get the message I am trying to send: it’s not all black and white!

    Keep up the good work! Don’t stop polishing, refining and listening to your users! Thank you ??

    –Dave from Germany ??

    P.S. This review was revised in October 2014 and changed from a 1-Star to a 4-Star review.

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  • I think 1 star is a bit too harsh isn’t it?

    If you look at the idea why this plugin is initially developed is to empower the WordPress.com users, so in the first place, if you don’t need it or already using commercial or custom built plugins, chances that you might not need the plugin.

    Supporting the plugin doesn’t mean you have to use it, right? ??

    Out of all points, I am moved with your first comment:

    Main interface/ design doesn’t match the WordPress interface – more like an “App” within WordPress. This is inconsistent and for CMS-like projects really NOT WANTED!

    For the “App”, I believe I have addressed it above. For branding purpose, I believe it is not far from WordPress because by itself, it is a product to distinguish from what is WordPress and what is an extension or plugin of WordPress.

    I don’t use all of the features, but I have started to let my clients using it and gather their feedback. So far, it has been good.

    Just my 2 cents really.

    Thread Starter David Decker

    (@daveshine)

    Thanks for your feedback!
    It really is not too harsh!

    I for myself don’t use the plugin on own projects because of the above reasons and I personally don’t need these features.

    However, a lot of clients use the plugin – they’ve read or heard about it and thought “it’s cool to have”, install via search in backend…

    Then I get the complaints how different it looks and they complain about the language (my clients don’t speak any English – I am from Germany).

    The different look would be ok if it were from another company don’t involved with the WordPress community. But this plugin here comes from the same developers that predict everywhere to use the coding standards – but these standards are rarely to be found in this specific plugin!

    As for the language issues I’ve just “fixed” this problem for my clients and the whole German speaking community by releasing a locale-specific plugin recently: Jetpack German (de_DE) – https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/jetpack-de/
    —> but also this could not fix completely all issues as the comment form by Jetpack is loaded via an iframe from www.ads-software.com so I can’t adjust any language settings in this little form… And clients complain about that.

    All these things have little to no interest of the developers of this plugin. They don’t seem to listen or don’t just want to.

    That’s the situation.

    If I could rate with zero stars then I would not hestitate to do so. This plugin is “pushed” it don’t deserves to be a role model plugin at all!

    –Thanks, Dave ??

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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