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Just saw alert on Calderra’s support forum that there’s a problem with the new release on WordPress 5.6. They suggest downgrading to 5.5.x. Annoying.

Me too. I tried cloning a form but can’t save it.

Jory,

I appreciate your quick response; however, I have to say it wasn’t terribly helpful. I nearly dropped my exploration of Pods when I read the FAQ page you sent me to, which imo bore almost no relation to my question.

However, I did persevere and came across the “Migrate Package” as a component of the standard Pods install (which can be enabled with a single checkbox). It appears to be precisely the tool I was asking for in my first (and key) question:

Are there tools or documentation anywhere to assist developers like me to migrate a pod application to a production site?

How is it that you’re providing support and don’t know this?

Also, you immediately marked the topic resolved. Frankly, based on your original response, from my perspective the topic wasn’t at all resolved. Based on my discovering the Migrate Tool, it would now be reasonable to mark it resolved, but not yesterday.

I appreciate that you’re a volunteer, and presumably haven’t been doing this very long, so I don’t want to give you too hard of a time. But if I were asked to rate the quality of the support you provided, it would not be very high.

Ajay, think like a customer!

From my point of view, I don’t care at all about “relatedness” in a theoretical sense, except that I hope you’ve done a good job creating the algorithm so that, in most cases, the links your plugin generates are helpful to my users. (And in no cases is non-sensical).

However well you do this, it’s never going to be perfect. I might have a post that says the chef of this restaurant used to work at Joe’s Italian Restaurant, but now has gone out on his own to start this wonderful Afghan restaurant. Hypothetically, I might want this to match other Middle Eastern restaurants (which might be categorized Greek or Israeli, and therefore don’t seem to match Afghan). So your algorithm might match Joe’s italian, plus other Italian restaurants, and miss the middle eastern connection altogether.

In this case the “relatedness” is triggered by the nature of cuisine (ie. the knowledge that middle eastern cuisine spans Afghan, Israel, and Greek cooking) not in the language. Your plugin will never make semantic connections like that. That’s why your customers want the option to override.

Not quite sure what your objection is, Ajay. Here’s what I mean by option 1. Let’s say I’ve set max number of related posts to 3. Sometimes your algorithm may NOT automatically select (in the top 3, anyway) a post I particularly want related to a post I’ve just added. Option 1 allows me to specify it (with your plugin filling in the next 2).

Also, it sets ordering (any manually selected related posts would show up at the top of the list of related links). So I might do it simply to shift a given related post to the top of the list.

BTW, there used to be a popular plugin that worked this way exclusively. It provided a little UI to select other posts, and then displayed only the posts you selected. I’m suggesting this as a supplement to the automatic selection that you currently do. Of course, if I’m limiting related links to 3, and I specify 3 related posts manually, your auto-selection algorithm doesn’t need to get involved for THAT post.

Does this make sense?

Ajay…

I’m glad you think “0” it’s a good way to specify unlimited timing on related posts.

While we’re fantasizing, let me suggest two other features that I think would be very useful:

1. Being able to specify related posts on a “per post” basis. You’re already allowing users to specify a custom thumbnail per post. This would just be an optional list of post ids that should be included with the related posts per post.
2. Similarly, excluding related posts on a “per post” basis. You’re already doing this globally. This would be an optional list at the individual post level.

Anyway, what you’re doing now is extremely useful. This would just make it perfect. Thanks again.

Hey, Ajay. Thanks for your interest.

What was wonky? Well, I have a site based on a heavily modified TwentyFourteen theme. I originally wanted to include the excerpt with the link, but the text always seemed to wrap around the thumbnail in a way I thought ugly. No doubt there is a CSS fix, but I wasn’t in the mood to spend time on that. I ended up just using the title, and am now I’m glad I did, as I think it will generate more click-throughs anyway.

You can see the result at: https://hiddentrenton.com

My only other complaint with the plugin is the way you handle “related posts should be newer than”. I don’t age out my posts (they’re reviews and I update them as needed). I originally figured that if I didn’t want to age out a post, I could enter a 0 there (or perhaps I left it blank). Instead, I got NO posts. So I entered a big number, and it’s fine. I don’t consider this “wonky” just slightly inconsistent, as you use the “0” convention elsewhere, e.g. “Limit content to be compared”.

It worked! Thank you.

Also, Eliot, thank you for the rapid response and the fantastic plugin. I used to use Kalin’s short code plugin, which is no longer supported, and never liked the replacement. I find your plugin wonderful to use, and will write up a glowing review after I deliver my system.

Cheers…

Yup. Same problem, too. I’ve used the plugin for years on a 3.x website, and will be sorry to lose it. But I need the excerpt or it’s useless to me.

Tobias…
Just an quick update. I delivered the application to the client and trained him to upload a csv file to TablePress. He’s running Excel 2003 on a Windows XP system (not on a Mac virtual machine as my test environment was). We still had encoding problems. It was fixed by loading the file into notepad and saving it UTF-8 as we’d previously worked out.

My only point for writing is to underscore the importance of the enhancement you’re planning to do. Us Mac users are used to having to do odd things from time to time to live with the dominant platforms. But my client is running a mainstream platform (if now a little dated) and is used to everything working. If he’s having problems, I suspect many other people would as well.

Again, thanks for your support through this! I’m a big fan of TablePress and you.

First of all, I was looking for a plugin that would work without my coding. So for me, the observation stands. If I wanted to write code, there are all kinds of things I could have done, but that’s not what I was looking for.

Indeed, your write up makes a big deal of the fact that you don’t have to write PHP to use this plugin. Nowhere do you say you have to accept a fundamental limitation by not coding, or suggest the additional features you can get by coding.

I’m continually amazed by WordPress plugin who spend, presumably, hundreds of hours creating code and then squat-all documenting it. I spent about 90 minutes evaluating your plugin, installed it, tried to make it work on my site. Again, since I had no intention of developing code with it, I had no reason to search the forum.

OK, I get the 50 lashes for not having read the changelog. However, now that I’ve read the changelog, I see that it says I need to “reset” the widget. What does that mean? I guess I’ll figure it out, but a few words from you would make it unnecessary for me to have to do that.

I would also note that the relevant comment is listed for Version 0.3 not 0.3.1. While I admit I didn’t read the change log at all, you’re expecting your users to read the ENTIRE changelog carefully for upgrade installation hints, which I frankly think is unrealistic and a misuse of a changelog (which by my way of thinking should be a history of what you’ve developed and what’s changed).

I don’t mean to give you a hard time (notwithstanding your snarky reply to my query). I really do love the plug in and thank you for building it and supporting it. However, I would submit essential installation instructions ought to be in the installation instructions.