Technical questions

Hi Rory,

We’ll look into making the enqueueing conditional, so the JS and CSS files are only loaded when a product catalog feature is in use (e.g. the shortcode or widget is on the page).

When we enqueue our own JS file, we follow the WordPress standard/recommended way of doing it (https://developer.www.ads-software.com/reference/functions/wp_enqueue_script/). We don’t load the jQuery library ourselves. Following the method prescribed by WordPress at that URL, we just specify that our JS file requires jQuery.

Thanks for getting back to me, and looking into conditional loading for resources, much appreciated.

I’m also inquiring about performance issues, such as minifying, are you going to look into that as well? It’s a very simple thing to do, which has many benefits.

There are a number of files that could benefit from minifying them.

Also, can you look into bundling multiple files together? My server would thank you, and my users will thank you, for reducing the amount of server hits, and round trips from device to user, whereby speeding up the users experience.

Thank you as well for pointing me in the direction of the standard wordpress way of enqueuing files. I’m familiar.

I’m also familiar with one of the options, which is stipulating a version number of the script you’re calling.
So while yes, you can tell wordpress you need Jquery, you can also tell it which version to load.
https://developer.www.ads-software.com/reference/functions/wp_enqueue_script/#parameters
Look for $ver in the list.

The version you’re loading is years old, when the internet was still grappling with IE6, and a number of other issues, which a long ago relevant.

It could also be quite beneficial to look into another parameter you can add, which is to load all scripts in the footer, as opposed to the head.

This pattern is the recommended way to load scripts on websites.

Thanks again!

Hi Rory,

Thanks for the tip about the version number.

While it’s less likely that we’ll be combining or minifying the enqueued files (compared to implementing conditional enqueues), it’s definitely something we can explore as a possibility for a future release.

I appreciate taking the time to address these concerns, many thanks.

Ultimately I have 3 options:
1. I’ve already paid – not yet gone live though – and will have to modify this plugin accordingly – not ideal from a updates maintenance perspective, as I’ll have to continue having a staging environment strictly for merging my mods into your updates.

2. Leave as is – **more on this below

3. Abandon this plugin and chalk it up to lessons learned.

**
– I currently have a plain, basic website.
– I’m testing on a page with zero images, and no plugin related functionality.
– By simply enabling this plugin, with no products in the database yet, my page load went from .863sec to 6.734sec. You do the math.

It’s unfortunate that a company with “Web Design” in it’s name and title doesn’t, and won’t (a possibility), do very basic Front End optimizations on the code they are releasing into the wild, such as minification on assets. It’s actually baffling.
This is very basic Front End optimization 101. The very first thing people do to code.

I love the feature set of this plugin, it’s fantastic.
But the way it currently sits, I can’t have my users waiting 6-8 seconds for a page to load. In 2018, this is bananas.

Also, from a jquery standpoint, the versions of jquery and jqueryUI you are loading have been flagged with security vulnerabilities.

For future consideration when considering features and improvements:
https://techbeacon.com/23-front-end-performance-rules-web-applications
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/01/front-end-performance-checklist-2018-pdf-pages/

And range sliders in pure css for instance:
https://freefrontend.com/css-range-sliders/
Can have you eliminate jqueryUI completely, as it’s useless.

The financial implications for yourself and for people like me, who are using this to sell products, is measured. With documentation supporting performance increasing sales.

I hope at some point you consider a future update, as a strictly performance related update. You won’t be disappointed, and will fond it’s resources well spent.

Thanks.