Very dirty coding

  • norequests

    (@norequests)


    6 years, 6 months ago

    CSS is a mess: there is no base theme to choose which wouldn contain just a frame of css to apply your own css.
    Once you choose any of their themes and still want to apply your design by adding more css you almost can’t, because they already use “!important” tags in the basic css files so there is often no way to apply your code. How bad is that?!

    Also, this is a very very heavy plugin. Just check pagespeed insight or gtmetrix for yourself.

    I don’t understand the recent price increase either. If this would have been properly coded, that would be a different case but right now I keep looking for other options and I discard some features that this plugin has, because it’s non-sense what this team is selling for so much. (I bought the plugin for way less back in the day.)

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Plugin Author wpDataTables

    (@wpdatatables)

    6 years, 6 months ago

    Hi there, thank you for your honest opinion. Let us answer each point of your review:

    • Base theme: while we see you are savvy about CSS, 95%+ of users, unfortunately, aren’t, and just want an option to choose without configuring any additional settings. The plugin, however, has an advanced customization page where you can configure colors, fonts, sizes, and other style-related parameters without having to change the CSS.
    • “!important” tags: we dislike the use of !important as much as you do, and initially it wasn’t there. Unfortunately, as the plugin needs to be compatible with the majority of the themes out there, as well as combinations with other plugins, we had no other option: many of the themes have global styles applied to tables, and we were getting a lot of “rage” from the users that saw that the table is not looking as it’s supposed by design – as it inherited theme’s styles instead (see point 1). The only way to ensure that styles WILL be applied as intended in the majority of configurations, is to add ‘!important’ to the key elements. We tried multiple workarounds, and to the day it’s the most secure way, as many themes&plugins add !important already, and there’s no other way of overriding it, except adding another ‘!important’ on top of it. However, it’s still not a big problem to add custom styles to your table – we would be happy to help you with that if you reach out to us.
    • Page speed: the CSS and JS is minified to the maximum and only the needed assets are loaded on the page. Happy to look into your case, yet in 90% of the cases, it’s about the source table/content of the table being large (many columns and rows). There’s really no way of having a 5000+ cell Excel file to load fast on a webpage – the plugin supports server-side processing, however, to deal with large datasets.
    • Price increase: wp.org isn’t the proper place to discuss this, as only the free version is hosted there. We believe you’re referring to the price increase at CodeCanyon (as that’s the only channel where the price was increased), and, in brief, the only reason for that was that we are no more using it as the primary sales channel, but didn’t want to remove our items from there completely, so that our existing customers could access the lifetime updates. We set a high price instead, ensuring that new sales wouldn’t come through CodeCanyon, while existing users could continue to download new versions when released. As for the premium support access, we have a very good deal to offer for the existing CodeCanyon users, which is actually much better than what was previously offered there. You can contact us through private channels for more details.

    Once again — thanks for being our long-time user and make sure to reach out to us first if you encounter any questions or problems, we are happy to help with these.

    Best regards

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

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