Title: Very dirty coding
Last modified: November 17, 2019

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# Very dirty coding

 *  [norequests](https://wordpress.org/support/users/norequests/)
 * (@norequests)
 * [6 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/very-dirty-coding/)
 * 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](https://wordpress.org/support/users/wpdatatables/)
 * (@wpdatatables)
 * [6 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/very-dirty-coding/#post-12143147)
 * 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)

The topic ‘Very dirty coding’ is closed to new replies.

 * ![](https://ps.w.org/wpdatatables/assets/icon-128x128.gif?rev=3010404)
 * [wpDataTables - WordPress Data Table, Dynamic Tables & Table Charts Plugin](https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpdatatables/)
 * [Frequently Asked Questions](https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpdatatables/#faq)
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 * 1 reply
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [wpDataTables](https://wordpress.org/support/users/wpdatatables/)
 * Last activity: [6 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/very-dirty-coding/#post-12143147)