Disappointingly bug ridden

I’ve been using PootlePress plug-ins since 2014 when I purchased the original Page Builder for Canvas and I was a fan. I wish I could rate the new Page Builder Pro more highly but my experience of it since July 2016 has been a sorry tale of bug after bug and confusing support.

I purchased unlimited licenses for the Page Builder Pro plug-in back in July 2016, wanting to use it to build some websites which the end-users would be able to update easily, plus convert my existing website which use the now out of date Page Builder for Canvas. All the demo videos which had preceded the launch made it look super easy to use. Initially, all I wanted to do was create pages which had 4 columns each of which had a different colour scheme.

Unfortunately, my experience is of one bug after another. The latest bug, which the Pootlepress told me would be fixed in v3.5.0 wasn’t, neither was it fixed in v3.5.1 and I’m now told that it will be fixed within the next month. Unfortunately, it renders the plug-in almost unworkable if you need to use the text editor rather than just use the Live Edit facility.

First problem after upgrading was that, having upgraded to Pro, pages created in Live Edit didn’t display the rows when viewed in Firefox, but did when viewed in other browsers. Pootlepress support advised that this was a bug that they were fixing.

Next problem was that, having purchased unlimited licenses, I couldn’t get the upgrade to install on a site because my user e-mail address wasn’t the same as the e-mail address I’d used to purchase the licenses. After about a week of trying to sort the issue with Pootlepress support (which involved trying to install Page Builder Pro on at least 5 different sites), I was eventually put in touch with Freemius who look after the licensing for them and was told that there was a bug in the licensing system but they gave me a work round. Freemius were at pains to stress that it was a bug in their system not Pootlepress.

Once the multi-license installation issues were resolved, Page Builder Pro still didn’t work but after yet more to-ing & fro-ing with Pootlepress support it turned out that you need to activate one of the blog customizer, photography or Woocommerce plugins for the additional Page Builder Pro functionality to work – which isn’t mentioned anywhere in the documentation.

With that issue resolved, I started off simply, so I thought, with a need for a row containing 4 columns each containing the same amount of data both in shape and size, fully expecting the columns to be the same size – they weren’t. There were also problems with actually inserting images – different problems depending on which method of inserting was used. On 12 August 2016, I was told there would be a release to correct this within two weeks. 

I updated to v3.1.0 on 12 Sept 2016, deactivated all plug-ins except Page Builder Pro and found that the issues hadn’t been resolved. In addition, Live Edit was not working consistently in that ‘Update’ was hanging and the only way to get any progress was to leave the page and lose any changes that had been made. Instead of using Live Edit, I tried using Edit Page and then editing the Page Builder rows. This sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. To ensure that the problem wasn’t being caused by plug-in or theme conflicts, I set up a clean site with nothing but 2016 Theme and Page Builder Pro installed and got the same results.

On 15 September, I was told that the problem was with the color picker and that there was a new update coming out the following week.

I updated to 3.5.0 on 23 September – but the issue had not fixed. I was told to stick to working in one view. What was really frustrating was that prior to the v3.1.0 update, I’d been able to edit either in Live Edit, Edit Page and in either the visual or text option without these problems.

Updated to 3.5.1 on 27 September – but the issue was still not fixed. I was told to edit text using Live Edit, not to go into any other view. I asked how I could deal with things like adding mail to links without going into the text editor and received no response.

On 28 Sept, I was told that the issues would be fixed in the next month.

Pootlepress support is confusing and they seem to ignore quite a lot of the information you give them.

There is a support forum but if you look at it a number of the posts have never been responded to by Pootlepress or the contributor has been asked to raise a support ticket. In order to raise a support ticket you have to log-in to your Pootlepress account. When you submit a support ticket from there, there’s a message saying that you will get an automatic acknowledgement – you don’t so you don’t know whether it has been received or not and there is no record in your Pootlepress account of any support tickets which have been submitted. When you do get a response from Pootlepress it is headed ‘Re: PootlePress Support ticket for:’ with nothing after the ‘for:’ . This means that if you have multiple issues it is really difficult to keep track of each one. Plus if you have been given a solution and want to revisit it you have to open up loads of e-mails to find the one you are looking for.

It used to be that you could see support tickets in your Pootlepress account but now all historic support tickets have disappeared.