headelf

NOT TRUE! The documentation sucks (project under review) but the plugin does exactly what it needs to do.

To do justice to your query I’m going to provide as much of my observations as possible.

I get the impression a lot of the bad reviews/bad press you’re getting has to do with a failure in documentation.

People have a tendency to get frustrated when they don’t understand something. Frustration leads to anger which easily results in really poor reviews. Improving the documentation might fix some of this. Documentation designed to get a new user up and running in minutes, not days something in the vein of an “Encyclopedia Plugin for Dummies” might be what is needed.

Let me give you a few examples of where I hit snags.

Usually a plugin has a bit of explanatory documentation right in the plugin’s “view details” link. Look at Akismet and All In One Security & Firewall. Those and many other plugins give a good reference to how the plugin works and what it’s doing. Some plugins have screenshots but many don’t. Screenshots without explanatory text aren’t very helpful.

Nowhere in the setup or introduction does the documentation explain how Encyclopedia works. I now understand it’s widget based and doesn’t rely on short codes. I had to find that out by trying all sorts of things and doing a bit-less-than-comprehensive reading of the support forum.

Nowhere in the documentation I’ve read is there a step by step explanation (with pictures and/or examples) for what each widget does and where they can be placed for different results. This would be simple to do but very helpful for the new user.

I think your plugin is brilliant. Your documentation sucks. Right now your documentation is set for a high-end WordPress user who can easily alter the guts of WordPress themes. Most WordPress users aren’t interested in being that skilled. They want a vanity site or an off-hours income generator. They’ll cruise the themes gallery until they find something close to the layout they need, spend a couple hours tweaking colors, fonts and images via the customizer and they’re happy. They don’t want to/can’t spend days or weeks acquiring the knowledge necessary to use your plugin. There is no bridging documentation.

A simple set of “getting started” pages with pics and/or video would be awesome, something to fill the gap for the casual WordPress user not willing or able to do the grunt work/research to understand how your plugin works. There are more people without programming skills than there are developers. Those “noobs” need a starting point and a little bit of hand holding. Once they have that they could easily transition to wanting more and paying for the plugin. Without adequate documentation, there’s no bridge to “paying customer.”

Review your one star ratings. How many say “documentation”?

Holy smoke. I just figured it out. My comment regarding dearth of documentation stands but I’ve got it now! Awesome Plugin! Five stars for function, two stars for documentation.

Perfect! Thanks so much!

Yes. I’ve tried so many different things . . . and I’m finding it fairly frustrating. I don’t want parent pages and child pages, I want a MENU, categories for pages that show up where they’re supposed to on the sidebar, that are order-able. ARG. In the past have created my own themes and done wholesale changes on others’ themes but it’s been so long since I worked with any of this enough of it has changed to make the learning curve uglier than I care to discuss.

I’ve added custom menu widgets to my sidebar to place my menus. It’s giving me close to what I need but it still feels (and looks a bit) like a hack job. I remember this feeling when learning php/mysql many years ago. This too shall pass.

And now something else is broken. *sigh* Hopefully I can get it fixed without losing all my client’s input. This re-acquaintance with WP is happening whether I sigh or not so I’d better get back to it. TY for your time.

So, to state the completely obvious . . . I’m supposed to spend even more time NOT servicing my client by adding biting remarks to the multitude of themes that DON’T match my specified criteria? Oh yeah. That’s a stellar idea. Not.

And while I’m being excessively bitchy, why do theme authors hard-code color? A little judicious php and the color theme can be endless tweaked by the end user. I’m not getting that one either . . .

*sigh* Okay, I’m temporarily done being bitchy. Thank you for taking the time to respond even if it wasn’t helpful.

Thanks! That gives me a starting place!

I do believe I’ve isolated to the ozh’ Admin Menu plugin. When I updated the plugin the problem disappeared. I’ll watch for it in the future. Thanks.

It looks like this may be related to ozh’ admin menu plugin. ?

Is there an elegant fix for this or must I remove the WP installation and reinstall?

Tks.

Where do I stick the coding? Which file, specifically?

I can remove the WP install and reinstall it using the old style upgrade (strip everything except content and config, then upload and unzip). I’ve done that before with other WP sites. I’d prefer to just get rid of the admin bar. At some point I have to figure out why it’s determine to install beta vers.

Theoretically, remove the beta tester plugin. Please note I said “theoretically” because I did just that a couple months ago and 3.1 beta installed today. It shouldn’t have. I should have been back to stable release updates only. No such joy.

To this I’d like to add, it seriously SERIOUSLY screws with the loading time of my site. It went from loading quickly to . . . hang on while I go get coffee . . . and I am SO not kidding.

I SO want this thing gone until such time as it isn’t such a dog. The default should be GONE, not DOG.

In the columnar layout (pie in the sky asking) I would like to be able to set a fixed width for one or both of the sidebars. I would also like to be able to set the theme to display only the left sidebar instead of the default right sidebar when a single sidebar is set.