• currently trying out the plugin:

    can’t see much: creates places custom post type with some custom taxonomies. I can manually do that or with another plugin.
    it adds Google maps and foursquare maps. Other plugins do too.

    what is so special here?
    I am sure I don’t see the bigger picture or can’t find the feature that makes it stand out so give me some hints please ??

    Besides how about letting users of the plugin decide the names of the custom taxonomies created? I personally don’t like: “tapes of places” and “tags for places”
    Also I’d like to call PLACES => LOCATIONS…

    any way without hacking the plugin?

    https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/gpress/

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Author Mark Smalley

    (@msmalley)

    The taxonomies and reference to names can all be changed via the .po files, making it quite flexible, but yes, in its EARLY beta state, it does not do much, other than adding places and maps – the beauty is in its future, where things will soon become very interesting, as seen in our roadmap – https://gpress.my/roadmap/

    I am sorry to say this, but I have been following gpress for a while and it DID promise a lot. But in actual fact it delivers relatively little. I know it takes a fair ammount of effort to produce something good, but it’s always better to under sell than over sell. Gpress has definitely been over sold. Also I followed a recent link to geopress via gpress but found that this plugin is to be discontinued as the developers had moved on to mongopress.
    I think that you guys are surely talented, but I’ve got no idea where you are going with this. Not to mention the fact that other plugins are now moving above and beyind what gpress does or even promises to do.
    If you’d focused on gpress and nothing but gpress(instead of geopress, mongopress etc etc, I am sure you would have produced something amazing.
    I await the new version hoping for something ground breaking – but I feel that I will again be disapointed. I hope that I am wrong and the gpress people produce something amazing ??

    Ovidiu – I regret to say you are correct – at the moment there is nothing special here – and you may as well just use some other geotag and custom post type plugins

    Plugin Author Mark Smalley

    (@msmalley)

    To be clear, I am the only person that was working on gPress, and did so in my spare time. At the time of starting development on it, I had a dead-end job and ample spare time. Since then, I got married, had a kid and found a job that is truly fulfilling, where we are currently developing our own OpenSource NoSQL CMS system – https://mongopress.org

    Like any community, there are a lot of good folk, but with any community as large as this one, there are also lots of undesirable unappreciative idiots. In all my time where I was actively developing gPress, I only ever had one truly helpful support request, where most of my “support” time was spent asking people to confirm if it was a conflict with one of their other plugins or a non-standard theme they were using (which about 90% of problems were). I mean; seriously, try to be more active in your bug reports – investigate and play with the code and try to give a developer a helping hand, even if just pointing him or her towards a possible fix – this stuff is OpenSource, you have it at your fingertips and can help change the world! I was once contacted on Christmas day practically ordering me to stop what I was doing and help fix some site where my plugin conflicted with one of the other 600 plugins that they had installed. I’ve had vicious and depressing emails, repetitive DMs and and all kinds of nonsense from people with very little if any appreciation. On top of that, my plugin was remove twice from the repository and my personal user account here across the WordPress network was even deleted once – with the only possible “official” explanation having been that it was more than likely an over-zealous contributor. All of this, coupled with the fact that I now have a family that I need to spend my precious time with has made it extremely difficult to continue working on things…

    But that’s not without trying. I took on a few “geo-relevant” freelance projects that allowed for additional features to be added, and I even managed to sell the concept of my plugin to the new company I worked at, where we started developing a huge BuddyPress project that’s added a lot of stuff to the latest unreleased version (including geo-spatial polygon generation and proximity queries along with OpenStreetMap integration and enough funk to wet your pants all days long), and has even resulted in the development of 3 new “high-end” plugins that have also not been released. However, that project and our commitment to the WordPress community was put on hold at around the 80% completion mark when we started experimenting with MongoDB and quickly found an extreme distaste for anything based on the antiquity known as MySQL. Coincidentally, this was about the same time we started developing MongoPress.

    When time permits, I will certainly return to this project – in some-shape or form, and in the meantime, my thanks to everyone that did have something positive to contribute, and will hopefully see you again on the otherside…

    To all the trolls, “SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH” ??

    OK, fair enough, and maybe I was slightly harsh.
    But with publishing these plugins to us naive ‘users’ there is surely some element of responsibility – I can understand the crazy situation with the Christmas Day requests, this is truly unbelievable – but in the case of plugins like gpress a user may intend to be mapping hundreds or even thousands of locations, and if it turns out that the plugin will not do what it has been intended to do the user may then have to migrate to another plugin. Without the programming skills to transfer coordinates, this might mean re-mapping all the locations again – and most people like you also have full time jobs and a family, and are time constrained.
    All I ask is that there is transparency – I don’t care if the plugin will take another ten years to get to the next release as long as I have some idea.

    So, just to be absolutely clear without being antagonising, when you say that “I will certainly return to this project – in some-shape or form” does this mean that the project is on hold for now. If so, no problem and I can happily go on may way and look for another plugin to do the job. If not, then could you tell me approx when you expect the next release to be?

    I think this plugin has massive potential, hence the degree of frustration in my last post, and if developed I think users would be happy to pay for this – at least I would.

    A

    Plugin Author Mark Smalley

    (@msmalley)

    Transparency has always been of the up-most importance to me, which is why I labelled the initial release as 0.1 and we are still at 0.2+ – as well as responding to each and every question regarding its state of affairs, but you seem to be demanding answers to impossible questions. I will be returning to this project when my boss tells me to, or when I have the time to take on paying freelance work that will allow for continued development. Exactly (or even roughly) when that will be is impossible to say, and whether this project (GeoPress and all continued work I do on geo-location) remains in MySQL and WordPress when I do is a whole other issue of its own. Feel free to fork the project, and as someone recently reminded me…

    ” If you are not entirely satisfied with the product, please feel free to request a full refund ” ??

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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