Will try to constructive BUT please don’t force this on us!

  • We are the creators and owners of a successful eCommerce website (thecoachingtoolscompany.com). This is one of the worlds leading websites for coaches, and is also our livelihood. The site has been through many iterations but in 2016 we ditched our old cart and implemented Woocommerce so today our site is completely WordPress/Woocommerce. Whilst it may not be perfect it works extremely well for us. I admit that the editor is dated, and we user Visual Composer for our more complex pages (as well as custom php templates etc). This gives us great editing functionality without breaking anything else and allows us to easy switch to the classic editor if needed. And despite comments about VC being bloaty, our site speed is fine (which isn’t true after activating Gutenberg)

    More importantly all of our users know how to use the current system (pages, posts, products etc) with or without visual composer. I have procedures manuals based on the current system. We have invested 1000s of hours getting the site to look and work the way it works with the current system.

    Our focus is on running our business. WordPress/Woocommerce is great, but it is just a platform. It is not our business. Our biggest concern is business continuity. Any interuption to our business means lost revenue. This means taking updates so we don’t become a target for hacking. But it also means testing every update through rigorous regression so we don’t break our website.

    So please please please consider you current user base when deciding how to proceed with this. It has been suggested that the negative reviews are from people just don’t like change. I find that unfair. I keep my WordPress install up to date and have no problem with change. But I have a business to run and many more responsibilities beyond keeping the website up. So when change breaks my business and costs me time for no benefit that’s a big problem. Its businesses like ours, that make money using this platform, that are in a position to pay for premium plug ins (we use many) and so help to make the ecosystem economically viable.

    I have made similar comments on the Woocommerce github forum, when Woo releases have broken things on my site. I totally understand why some of those changes have been made, but I don’t think enough consideration is given to your established user base some times, and I always end up spending significant extra time in regression testing figuring out the changes just so I can put the site back how it was. This gets even worse if its a client site and I have to explain why there is extra cost just to keep things the same.

    It has been suggested that we should get more involved in the dev process, but at the risk of repeating myself we have a business to run. The whole point of using WordPress/Woocommerce is NOT to have to be in the nitty gritty of the code base. If I wanted to do that I could just get a copy of Solidus or similar.

    I have built similar sites for a few clients who are in the same boat. For better or worse they understand and know their way around the current system, and the step change that Gutenberg introduces will kill them.

    Also even if Gutenberg turned out to be way better than Visual Composer, what’s the business case for rebuilding all of the pages/posts that use VC, or even investing the man hours in learning something new?

    So by all means keep working on this as a plug in, BUT PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE give us the option of not taking it as default.

    On to some specific hopefully constructive feedback…

    I just installed this on my staging environment, so here are my initial observations:

    Front end of the site SEEMS ok which is great (I haven’t run an extensive regression test tho)

    In the back end

    Overall my initial reaction is where the hell is everything. I (and my staff) are going to have to totally relearn even the basics (where is publish. excerpt. my taxonomies etc). HELP!

    Also the back end is much slower showing lists of posts/pages/products and getting into posts/pages/products to edit. As soon as I disable guttenberg its snappy again.

    Woo Products look terrible:
    All of the content is squashed into the middle of the screen making it hard to read. Especially the meta boxes.
    It looks like all the Meta boxes are there but all of the formatting is gone. There is no clear delineation between the meta boxes so it looks like one big jumble of fields
    Some of the fields are totally screwed up (e.g. squashed into a 1 character wide column)
    Product short description has disappeared (I eventually figured out this is now under excerpt in the documents settings column over on the right, which is too small to edit and missing the extended functionality of the Product Short Description field).
    Having all of the product taxonomies collapsed is a pain. Same for the featured image, gallery. Its way better to be able to review this at a glance. I can scroll!
    Can’t find Woo visibility and other settings (Catalog Visibility, Yoast summary information etc) These are normally in the Publish box. We use this functionality!

    Pages
    Much as for products – content squished into the middle, meta boxes lacking formatting and gard to read.
    Plus there’s a big deprecation warning floating round under the text, but I can’t read it because its half under the side menu.

    Overall\
    This is just at a glance – I would expect during full regression testing that more would come out of the woodwork.

    Trying to switch to Gutenberg for us (and for other established users I expect) will be a nightmare. The only saving grace is that there is still the option to use the classic editor which seems to be unaffected (other than the admin screen performance issue).

    I simply have no business case to justify going through the pain of this kind of change. If you think that the future of WordPress is for casual/non-business users (which would be strange given the acquisition of Woo) then maybe Gutenberg is the way for you to go. But it you want WP to continue to be the flexible platform with wide appeal that it is today, please please please keep this fully optional with full backward compatibility, for that sake of those of us that have invested in the current system to get our sites the way we like them.

    If this is forced on me, then my choice becomes take the update and the pain (not acceptable) or stop updating WP (and eventually become vulnerably to unpatched security issues – not acceptable). So the day this is forced on me becomes the day my company has to stop focusing on running our day to day business and focus on what our future CMS/eCommerce solution is.

    I am more than happy to have a one on one conversation with anyone at WP about any of this.

    Thank you!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author Tammie Lister

    (@karmatosed)

    Thank you for taking the time to leave a review and for being considered in your reply. It matters, feedback really does make a better product, so thanks.

    That sounds like an exciting site you run and thank you for telling the context of your review. Can I ask is Visual Composer the only thing you use for layouts?

    I’d like to clarify that you are being listened to and not assumed just because left a lower review to have issues with change. Even if you did, that’s a totally valid human reaction and one to be recognised and worked with.

    Further, I would like to add that nobody on the team expects you to be a developer, I am not and that’s totally ok, everyone has different paths and roles.

    I do want to ask just to consider what if visual composer worked with Gutenberg. Would you feel differently? What could Gutenberg have that would make you not use visual composer? Let’s imagine updating to it worked seamlessly.

    When you first loaded it, seems you wanted some form of guide or more visual guidance. Is that right? What would have helped you there?

    It’s worth noting that Woo are working on compatibility with Gutenberg, I absolutely understand right now you may have experienced some issues, but those will be fixed. Overtime WooCommerce will become more and more merged into Gutenberg as far as experience goes. The team there are exploring what it means for them to take this route.

    • This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by Tammie Lister.
    Thread Starter delsey

    (@delsey)

    Thanks for the response. I am just looking at this again with the latest version of everything, but the same issues as detailed above still exist.

    For layouts we use either VC or just the native editor (for simple blog posts etc)

    For us to move off VC, Guttenburg would have to automatically migrate all of my VC pages into Guttenburg – with no styling or CSS issues and working across all devices sizes. I know that we have tweaked layout and CSS specific to VC, so its hard to imagine this happening!

    Then someone from www.ads-software.com would come and re-train our employees for us. Or you would compensate us for the time we need to spend learning not just a new editor, but a whole new UI experience.

    And all plugins, metaboxes etc would be fully tested and working.

    “When you first loaded it, seems you wanted some form of guide or more visual guidance. Is that right? What would have helped you there?” No – I just want it to work with my existing site without me having to do a bunch of work! Basically whilst I am not against change, our organization does not want or need a new WordPress editing/UI experince (self serving maybe, but also true!)

    ” Overtime WooCommerce will become more and more merged into Gutenberg as far as experience goes.’

    Thank makes me even more afraid, as it could remove the option for me to just disable Guttenberg and run our business. In the processes of re-testing Guttenberg I upgraded to the latest version of Woo and I can already see a couple of issues just related to the Woo upgrade. I am sure I can fix them, but the amount of regression testing required once 5.0 hits just to keep my site the way it is could be huge.

    As I said we are a use technology to support our business, but technology is not our business. I simply have no business case to justify going through the pain of this kind of change, and I fear at some point this change will make WordPress/Woocommerce unusable for our company.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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