Replacement Plugin

Randy that plug-in looks to be pretty new…therefore no track record. And it doesn’t offer nearly the feature-set that Time.ly offers. Time.ly is a great product. They’re a tiny company. Without our support we can lose them.

Sheila – I agree with you on most points. I really do like the functionality that Time.ly offers. Two things have me moving: 1) I have experienced entire website crashes twice now, and 2) I recently loaded “P3 – Plugin Performance Profile” (https://support.godaddy.com/godaddy/wordpress-p3-plugin/) and was concerned to see that over 60% of plugin usage was being consumed by ai1ec.

I think they have the right idea; the screens are beautiful, but it’s just not stable enough for my liking. I have made a complete transition of my websites over the weekend and they are running noticeably faster.

I wish it were not the case, but it is. I can’t afford so much time dealing with these issues, AND my requirements may be less than yours or others for functionality. That’s why Event Organiser works for me.

Thank you for taking the time to add your voice.

Thanks for the plugin tip Randy. I’ll check it out. You’re right, performance (speed) is not at the top of the list for my clients. They want their stuff to LOOK great which Time.ly has nailed. But I’ve also downloaded Event Organiser for future consideration. Thanks.

You got that right! The Time.ly stuff is beautiful. I hope they will get it together and clean this stuff up. I am a developer, too – so I know the problems that they are encountering. It’s tough, no doubt and I really hope they pull through.

We are actually rewriting the plugin to solve performance/stability issues. 2.0 will be totally different and will have a unified codebase.
As i said elsewhere we are a small team and we have senior developers like me almost full time on support. We are trying to do our best unfortunately 3.7 release did lots of damages to our wordpress/free version.
Basically we do what we can as we have to support three different code bases and this is a nightmare
Obviously we’d rather avoid breaking websites as it results in the weekend spent doing support ??

Nicola – this is great news; all of us that love the plugin will be happy to support you.

Here’s something that I’ve noticed a lot of lately in plugins – the base (free) version is fully functional, single code base. Where developers are making $$ is with functionality add-ons which are completely separate plugins.

For example, I have a forms creation plugin (https://vfbpro.com/) for which you can buy a bundle of ALL add-ons for $65USD. One time, unlimited use. After using the base plugin and seeing how great it was, you bet I sprung for the whole enchilada. Didn’t need all that functionality, but wanted a couple AND I wanted to say “thanks” for the amazing code.

So it’s a bit of a juggling act – put your best stuff out there for free, don’t gouge on “multiple site” nonsense and generate TONS of good will. That concept, put out there by Frank Kern and Eben Pagan, made those guys tens of millions of $$$. How would you like to make millions just because people like who you’re being and the great products you put out there? Hmmmmmm.

@randy That’s exactly what we are going to do. Single code base and add ons as separate plugins, this also lowers the resource used by our plugin. Hope things calm down and we can actually work on that instead of supporting users with broken websites ??

” instead of supporting users with broken websites..”

This shows some contempt for users of your plugin – your plugin caused the problems but we see no co-ordinated feedback on your support forum about what you are doing to help us.

If you provided decent support and a well coded product, you wouldn’t have so many unhappy people who are now unlikely to use any of your products again. And who is going to pay $75 for a ‘pro’ version that is having the same problems?

If you want to be successful (i.e. make money) its CUSTOMER FIRST!

@dragonc we are trying to provide support but obviously we support pro customer first. As i said, we have senior developers like me doing support and this is not optimal, because, as you can imagine, senior developers should work on the product and not on support otherwise, since our product is mainly free, the company can’t survive.
I mean, bugs are part of the game, we try as much as possible to avoid them, but we can’t just eliminate them.

Surely paid customers come first, but don’t ignore the rest of us – this is where your paid customers come from.
Messages posted on your support forum are being ignored for many long days. You’ve got lots and lots of very unhappy people and there is no co-ordinated effort to tell us what you are doing to fix these problems.

There are posts telling people to upgrade to one version, other posts saying don’t upgrade to that version, use this version, half a dozen different threads which go unanswered etc. None of your free users have a clue as to what to expect or when.

I’d love to buy the very expensive version but do you really think I would with the mess this project is in? You have a what was great product, but unfortunately its broken and we need some help.

For what it’s worth, I think they’re on the right path. It appears that they tried to support too many code bases to implement free vs. paid version. If you read the thread above, you’ll see that Nicola talked about creating a “base” version that’s totally free and 100% functional, and that the paid pieces are add-on plugins to give extra functionality.

This is all great, but it requires serious re-tooling and a bunch of pain and suffering with us AND them until it’s in place. It’s like trying to turn a cruise ship 180 degrees.

I get that it doesn’t help us at the moment – we’ve got sites to maintain and keep running – but my sense is that they’ll get the ship turned around and make a good go at it.

@dragonc the problem as i said and Randy said and as i wrote in many posts is that we have different codebases. 1.10.1-standard is a TOTALLY DIFFERENT version from 1.10.5 you can download on wordpress.
We created the forums ( i was totally against that by the way, my idea was to provide technical help on stackoverflow.com where people at least was encouraged to provide support ) to let people help each other and for us to provide some standard guidelines on how to debug problems, right now our support manager was on vacation last week and so the forums went unattended, but anyway we can’t answer anyone, simply put, there is not enough workforce for it.
Anyway things should get better when we unify the codebase as having three different codebases it’s a nightmare. Version 1.11.4-pro is stable now, version 1.10.9-Standard is stable too, usually the main source of trouble is conflicts with other plugins, but we have 60.000 standard installs and we can’t simply help anyone for free. I’m trying to provide support here but as you can see i just suggest actions, i can’t fix broken sites to everyone ??
Hope this explains some things.

As a TOTALLY SATISFIED user, I’d like to say that I am totally committed to Time.ly. I’ve been using their plugin for a number of versions and it keeps getting better and better. I’ve moved from the free version to the Pro version and (from my experience), the support could not be any better!

When upgrading WP and ai1ec, I’ve had issues, as most users have. Some of those issues have been theme-driven and some not. I’m lucky in that my theme developer (Artisteer) helped my resolve a couple of the issues I was having. Nico has resolved other issues for me as have some of the other folks at Time.ly.

I WOULD NOT even consider switching to another calendar plugin. The All-In-One-Event Calendar works for me 100% and I could not be happier. In addition, my users are happy! And at the end of the day, this is all that matters.

I want to keep using it BUT.. despite Nicola’s “version 1.10.9-Standard is stable too” I have to differ.

I created a brand new website with no plugins and only Twenty Ten, Twenty Eleven and Twenty Twelve as themes, and NO plugins.
The navigation doesn’t work, and the plugin does not update ro the current days events – I’m having to do that manually.

As for using the pro version – fine but I don’t need what its got, which leaves me with either no support or paying a heavty $75 just to get support – my websites are community sites with no income.

I just wish Timely would clear the confliting mess of threads on their forum and post a clear message telling us we’re on our own, and giving a rough timeline of when we might see the mentioned new version.

I’ll continue to manually change my events each day until either a new version comes out, or another plugin with these features comes along.

My complaint is both about the lack of support – I get Timely’s issues with that – AND the huge amount of conflicting and confusing information they posted. Tidy it up, and tell everyone what you’ve told me so we all know where we stand – out in the cold.

This from Timely’s website, and rather than “clear” it throws even more confusion.

Let’s try to make things clear.
Version 1.10.4 ( or 1.10.3 ) without anything else written is the version we have on www.ads-software.com. The latest version is 1.10.4.
Version 1.10.1-standard is the version which is hosted on our server which has many more features than 1.10.4 ( 1.10.4 is actually more or less 1.9-standard )
Version 1.10.1-standard didn’t look for updates to www.ads-software.com until WordPress 3.7 arrived which broke our plugin. So users with 1.10.1-standard received a notice to upgrade to 1.10.3/4 which usually broke the plugin.
We have released version 1.10.9-standard which fixes the problem. If you install version 1.10.9-standard and still have issues please copy the themes-ai1ec folder from wp-content/plugins/all-in-one-event-calendar folder to wp-content, replacing the old folder ( of course preserve any child theme that you have ).
So our advice is to install version 1.10.9-standard. Post here if you still have troubles, including the error found in the PHP error log if the page is blank.