Plugin went from poor to GREAT. Performance, quality, support

Several months ago I had given this plugin a poor review. We’ve used the time.ly plugin for a good while right now. We are a heavy duty user. Most pages on our site display 60+ events, with a ton of categories. We use the core + extended views so I can’t comment on the social piece or calendar subscription/feed feature)

We did a pretty exhaustive review of calendar plugins and time.ly was the most fully featured plugin, by far. I think that was part of the problem when they started out. I think they bit off more than they could chew in the beginning.

We beat them up a lot.

At some point about 6 months ago, the company really grew up. I think it was just a matter of they were finally able to get in front of the learning curve.

Release testing went from so-so to very good.

I think they re-factored some of the code. The last few releases cleaned up a ton of annoying small bugs and improved performance DRAMATICALLY. (we were always able to tolerate the bugs but performance was killing us)

We just did a stress test simulating 500 simultaneous users while at the same time having a bunch of our users click around the site. Our performance went from less than acceptable in earlier revisions to OUTSTANDING. (500 simultaneous users equates to over 20,000 visits/day )

The last two releases mowed down a ton of bugs and they made the admin settings a lot more intuitive, and with an improved in-dashboard help facility. And some “icing on the cake” new eatures.

They started having developers handle support forum questions directly instead of a support manager intermediary. Responsiveness and quality of answers improved dramatically. We also observed a healthy level of transparency taking place- they became proactive about posting about bugs and providing good workarounds. (we are bug-free now)

One note, if you are doing a “heavy duty (high # of visitors, high # of events, DON’t use an $10/month hosting plan when for just $14 bucks more a month you can get great performance. (less than $1/day)And don’t upgrade to an expensive VPS from a crappy hosting company. We had earlier used hosting companies like site.5, bluehost, godaddy and wp-engine. We switched to Pagely (WP-optimized, less “rules”than wp-engine) for just $24/month and it was WELL WORTH IT.

We are very happy we stuck with Time.ly. They are a bunch of smart people who, in my opinion, had a very attractive feature set that generated an on slot of demand that was just too much when they started out. Instead of withering, they responded to the challenge and have an awesome product that is driving a ton of value for us.

Tom