Nothing special itself and part of a truly horrible plugin suite

Using Toolset is the worst decision I ever made for my business. Every update reaffirms this fact and makes me regret using Toolset. Random new code might be output on the front end (Views). Layouts break until I go through and re-save every one. Cell types become “unavailable”. There are a dozen other problems I’ve had. Most of them broke my sites in a significant way. If you’re a developer building custom sites, I do not believe you should use Toolset under any circumstances. Maybe Toolset is works okay for some people, but it has created major problems on each site I’ve used one or more components on. Of course, I’m no longer using any component on new sites, but I have to support the existing ones. A very costly mistake.

Types on its own is fine for what it does, except that it really doesn’t have any advantages over any other similar utilities and leaves some interface elegance to be desired. I don’t like its interface or the fields it creates on post edit screens, and the choices for those fields is limited. The repeater fields are particularly horrendous. Props for including a repeater field in the free version, though.

However, you will be enticed within the plugin to buy their Toolset suite, promising sophisticated site-building without code. I have used Types and other Toolset components on several sites. Where I have used Types alone, I wish I had used ACF. On the sites where I’ve used other Toolset components, I wish I hadn’t at all. I have wasted a lot of time and energy because I used Toolset, going back to fix sites that broke down the road or too close to launch/soon after launch when bewildering behavior or bugs were discovered.

Views does require coding for lots of features, such as conditionals, and the shortcodes in which you have to do that coding are really messy.

Each component has its little bugs that get introduced with updates and later resolved (sometimes), but some of these are huge and have cost me lots of wasted time developing workarounds, redoing configurations that were lost because of a bug or unexpected behavior, or rebuilding in a way to remove the plugin. For example: the Modules plugin will overwrite components during import even when you specifically instruct it not to in the import options.

Updates for components, Types included, have broken my sites because of sloppy coding (on their part). For example: a Views update injected new elements onto the page, even though those elements were only relevant to a feature I had specifically disabled. I had to add a filter to remove this code after discovering the bug.

The Layouts plugin just does not behave in a usable manner regarding assignment to content. Setting a layout as a “default” doesn’t work for existing content unless you specifically tell it to update existing, in which case it changes ALL posts of that type, even if they were assigned to other Layouts, and when you are modifying some default setting for OTHER post types, it will overwrite all your existing settings for the first type. It’s a mess. I’ve had to reassign every Page to its custom Layout because I wanted another Layout to be the new default, or because I made a Layout the default for a new post type and it overwrote all my Page settings.

Access doesn’t do what I thought it did based on its description, and I ended up using the free Members plugin and a little code to do exactly what I wanted with regards to limiting front-end access to posts and displaying content conditionally.

I could go on. I have 16 support requests in their paid support forum. A few of them were resolved satisfactorily. I have used Types and Views on a few sites, and the Toolset suite to build one full site (with 3 multisite sub-sites). I will not be using them on any projects in the future.

The most recent updates to the Toolset plugin suite completely broke my sites. Each custom cell type I created according to the documentation is now “no longer available.”