lelandrb

Nick, I can appreciate the desire to improve codebases. However, such a giant break in classes and IDs, shortcodes, and overall functionality warrants a brand new plugin in my eyes. I think that this is self-evident in that you even went so far as to change the name of the plugin.

I have no doubt that you built a quality product in Simple Calendar. That is not what I take umbrage to. It’s that “Simple Calendar” is not “Google Calendar Events v3.0.”

Discarding most everything that had existed in a previous version, and pushing that out as a simple update will generate some serious backlash. This is clear from my post here, and the other reviews you have no doubt seen.

Let me put it another way: ideally, upgrading a plugin should never break a site’s design or functionality. Yet here’s what the happened when my client clicked “upgrade” on the plugins page:

Before / After

You can make the argument that the design elements are an acceptable loss, since you were shooting to make wide-sweeping CSS changes. The fact that these weren’t announced loudly and clearly to every developer is concerning, but nonetheless, we’ll set that aside.

The day markers have changed from single letter to three letter abbreviations, the back/next buttons have been removed. Even the tooltips are broken.

Those are all still minor. This is the kicker: the calendar widget (which is how that calendar in the screenshots is being displayed, mind you) has been crippled. Here’s how it was set up previously: 2.x Widget.

Now, compare that to what happens post-update: 3.x Widget.

There’s an obvious lack of configuration options, to be sure. And even past all that, even after all of those issues, I can’t even display multiple feeds on a single calendar instance?

This isn’t just a changed codebase, this is a reduction in functionality.