Replies: 0
A couple of months ago, I would have easily rated this plugin as a standout among its class. Not necessarily for its design elements or user friendliness, tho, it is rather straight forward, but my support for the plugin came out of the practical, out of the box nature of the software to enable a designer to configure a membership site, with most of the basic bells and whistles, but most intriquing was that the designer could allow visitors and members to create new content/post data contributions from their side of the aisle. THereby, preventing the necessity to allow them into and restrict the back-end.
It functioned as a full service membership platform, even allowing contributions to custom post type. Which, about 6-12 months ago, was the stark rave about WordPress up until recently with the advancement and launch of the gutenberg block element design mgmt.
Now, it is rather easy to find form plugins that will provide the same function, and coupled with a custom fields and or custom post/taxonomy plugin, along with Gutenberg and some type of advanced block plugin, a designer can achieve almost any design without ever bothering with code. Therefore, I have to think more carefully as to wether I would opt to utilize WP User Front-End.
It still serves to manage your visitors and members, allows for pay site function, and all that I mentioned above. However, one major drawback is their limitation about custom fields.
In fact, the programmer has since approximately 2.???, has decided to increasingly control options for additional variation of coding, not even allowing a designer to configure to differant plugins to align because of the render blocking coding he has implemented. It is nasty and virtually prevents anyone from tweaking the code to suit their specific needs. Overall, since earlier versions of the plugin, its friendliness to open source programming has decereased, nearly “rendering” he program useless, or in the least, unappealling.
Finally, I would rate this plugin a 7/10 due to its ease of use and sound coding, along with its ability to play well with other plugins. However, as the designer grows in their abilities and understanding of the WP platform and web design, one would most likely choose to abandon WP UF’s strict controls over code tweaking and open source to simply opt to design his own page template using gutenberg, learn bits of CSS, and opt to utilize smaller form plugins that require less resources. One thing that would have maintained WPUF’s appeal was the supposed coupling with The Events Calendar plugin. This union would have been a perfect combination and a must have for the beginnning designer. However, the developers decided to go and implement a render blocking code preventing any use of custom fields, even if you write your own custom code. By simply using the field names within your SQL associated with The Event Post Type, the render code essentially burdens your site to a stall seeking to prohibit anyone from inserting data into those tables.
What a shame? THis plugin with an events plugin would have been a slam dunk.
Now, its pretty much damn junk!