Wasted opportunities

  • For a plugin this expensive, and with yearly renewals, they could have offered more.
    I was one of the very first to jump on this train cause it looked ridiculously good compared to other member plugins. But then something changed and since they haven’t developed any new extensions at all, closed the forum and thus took away all useful quick reference info you could find, and when you add this to the 3 main big problems:
    – slowing down a site heavily
    – not always programmed the way it should be (too many compatibility issues with themes)
    – way to many updates (and always the next day after an update comes a fix for what was broken the day before) which makes it hard to be always on top of things (cause there’s a LOT of customization needed for demanding projects),
    then the final verdict is disappointing. What once looked like the best thing next to chocolate, turned into sour grapes.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Author Ultimate Member

    (@ultimatemember)

    Hi @petrp

    Thanks for the feedback. We did have some growing pains in 2016 which caused development of new extensions to slow down. We’ve grown the dev team since start of this year and development has picked up a lot.

    For last few months have been working on a big update to UM core (UM2.0, which has a lot of background work on improving code further) and we’ve also released 2 extensions: Terms & Conditions and Private Content in the last few months.

    We’re also about to go into beta release for our groups extension which will be released shortly after 2.0 is released and work has already begun on user location extension so people can add their address and show their location on a google map on their profile and then directory will show users by location.

    Cant really talk about extensions too much here, so if you want more info please reach out to me via here: https://ultimatemember.com/contact/sales/ and we can chat about roadmap for UM further ??

    We closed the forum and moved to email ticketing system for customer support to make providing support more efficient and faster.

    Thanks

    Thread Starter PetrP

    (@petrp)

    hi, thanks for the reply!

    well, the email ticketing system made it actually a LOT slower to get help. For each single small thing, you have to write a ticket and than wait for an eventual answer. The forum, you could get the answer yourself within minutes, and you won’t have to be even troubled and invest time in answering the same questions over and over.

    I hope 2.0 will eliminate the biggest obstacle (speed problem) of UM. And hopefully offer customizations of profile pages and listing pages (i mean, extensive customisations). When that’s done, i gladly go on with those yearly payments again.

    The location extension you mentioned, was developped two years ago by an external programmer and linked in your pages. I bought it, and the next thing i know if that he stopped developping it for your upgrades. Than he was bought out by some company who even didn’t want to release the upgraded new version even when i paid for it. Those are the things what are hard to swollow; that extension was/is pretty important and basic.

    Plugin Author Ultimate Member

    (@ultimatemember)

    Forum does have that benefit but we found with the forum that quite a lot of people would post the same topics and then as the plugin user base grew managing support as a team via forum was not working and needed to move to purpose built support helpdesk software.

    Quite a lot of other plugin/theme companies have moved away from forums in the last couple of years for similar reasons.

    Not really allowed to talk about the extensions too much on this site due to wp.org rules but we can discuss the location extension in more detail if you get in touch via here: https://ultimatemember.com/contact/sales/ and can get your suggestions on what you think would be good for our upcoming location extension.

    Thanks

    I have to agree with PetrP, we really need customizations of profile pages and listing pages. and removing the forum because people are asking the same questions seems odd, now they are just asking the same questions via the tickets system instead, that still takes time to answer ??

    • This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by Hampmir.
Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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