Version 12 Feedback – A bit disappointed

Hello
I know there might be a lot of people raving for the update but I’m sadly not one of them and here is why, which hopefully will help you to understand different point of views.
The major and all-praised update 12 brought us essentially just two features – most of the other features are just part of the so-called directory part, like front end sumbission.

1. Directory
Well to be honest everything you showed now was something we all expected with the 11 or 11.5 update when you advertised CPT and directory functions and what not. This was expected for that update but now you deliver something for what we don’t even have a documentation.

Let’s be honest here. The system will never be a full directory system because you guy are offering a newspaper theme and not a directory plugin. There goes so much into a directory functionality. CPT does not mean it needs to be a directory feature.

If you want something that comes close to a directory, allow your users the integration of GeoDirectory which is a real and proven plugin. I tried to utilize CPT to make the design work but your theme is lacking of many option to retrieve the code from GeoDirectory etc. Last it was mentioned this will be improved with this update. I’ll need to verify yet.

2. User Reviews
I’m actually not sure if this was even requested a lot based on the feedback on TF and your support forum. Most complaints about reviews were in regards to schema and that the system is lacking for options for author reviews. These days a lot of people are reviewing products, services, etc. This is were more features, granular options and design is very much needed.

In my case I’m now stuck with something I have not asked and it keeps loading up on my backend and wasting resources. Please let me know how to get rid of the user review part on my website. I don’t want to have it there or load anything.

3. Give users the option to enable or disable any features you release instead of just loading them on the site. See my User-Review complaint. Give me a toggle to turn it off so it does not load any additional files etc – or make it a plugin.

4. Focus on what you are – a newspaper theme and not the magic theme that does everything. Your theme is $58 and nobody should expect all the functionality from premium plugin out there. You’ll always get more requests from people to incorporate features from paid plugins into your theme. This is not working. Of course people are trying to go the cheapest way if possible but you have to decide if that’s good for you or sustainable. Author reviews function/features is content. A standalone Directory system is not.

Focus on content. Focus on a lean theme that is fast and does not have miles-long waste of full code on the page. Excel in bug fixes, make them more often. Relax on big feature announcements or updates when you release only half-baked solutions -> the first release of paywall (that was a mess) or the directory now.

5. Don’t let people wait 4 months for bug fixes because you are working on big updates. Your work is affecting all our websites and some of your clients are relying on good ranking and user experience to make some money. We were waiting too long for the review schema fix and the flex block requests and loading issue. Paywall still didn’t address a couple of things.

6. Deliver quality improvements not quantity features.

I have all sympathies for your hard work but for me, the wait was useless as nothing really changed. Now I have to wait another 4 months to hopefully get an update that takes care of author reviews so we can write reviews that look amazing. Or I have to switch to a theme that has that already but plays nice with CPT/ACF from other plugins.

Sorry to be the downer here.

I fully agree! We have problems with the review schema (ex review with 10 stars, pros ans cons wich are now a ranking factor), problems and bugs with the positioning of ads, the cloud pro themes don’t allow us to make looks that the standar templates allows, problems in the implementation of Disqus, etc…

Hear hear!!! Very good summary. The review-shema of the theme is really really basic and needs improvement asap. I have used in the beginning when switching to newspaper but stopped, cause there was no improvement in sight. 3 review styles (stars, percent and points) but in the review/article loop you can only show stars? Why not a box with percentage or points that change color based on the points (85+ is green, 65+ is orange under 65 is red… something like that).

And implementing new features that some won’t even need but the files are still loaded and will chunk up my website. No thanks. Also in the forum, the first article should be changelog and the second should be proposals for fixes and features (maybe with a ranking/voting system) – both pinned to the top. Something like a github for new and known problems/issues would be nice so that the community could give better feedback and know what tagdiv is working on.

Also, the implementation of pictures with like 20 different sizes… is that normal? They could downsize the quantity of picture-sizes. I know i can deactivate some of the sizes in the backend, but still, seems kind of chaotic and not well coded.

And yes, it really feels like the team is focusing on everything else, but what the theme should be “Newspaper” means content, news, articles, features, reviews. Not a Page to show the current corona-infections.

Like Shortcodes in articles to show the last 3-5 articles to a certain tag/category. Something like that. The tagdiv gallery… omg. Fix it, make it more accessible and give us additional options.

For ads, it would be great, if you could upload 3 different ad-codes for mobile, landscape and desktop for every ad-slot. The placement of the ads is really not optimal.

12.1 to 12.5 should be quality upgrades, no feature bullshit pls.

When it comes to performance and optimization, they are either unresponsive or offer copy-paste suggestions. Many website owners already make these “off-the-shelf” recommendations. I wrote many times that new updates should focus on “OPTIMIZATION” but it didn’t work. I love this theme but I am among those who stopped using it because of these issues.

I fully agree with this. The performance is getting worse and worse in my opinion. Being able to turn off individual options would definitely be a good solution. I took back the update to 12 anyway, because my page only showed content encoding errors. Actually, I like this theme very much, but really thinking about looking around for a possible alternative.

So any update or Feedback from Tagdiv as they are obviously active in the forum?

@Tagdiv any updates for the post?

How do you determin the “popularity of a request” for new features. Is there a poll or a site where people send their requests? If so, i’m not familiar with it.

Hi @Anamaria
Thank you for your feedback.
It is great that you want to help your customers to generate revenue but it would be more helpful if this would happen with products that make actually sense.

The paywall feature is a pain when it got released. You were providing something that was needed in your area but maybe not for all your customers. When we wanted to get rid of the invoicing part or certain fields it was mentioned that this sort of customization would be not possible. The feature did not create any backend users or gave us the option to add them to newsletters etc. The management of users was just difficult.

This is one of the features that got released half-baked but got advertised with a lot of noise.

The same happened to CPT in 11.5 Lot’s of noise about the awesome update but since day one of that update, your customers were asking for Demos and instructions. Instead, we were asked to wait for the next update which took 4 months. So I kind of felt it be wrongly advertised.

If you go by popular requests, I think I saw more requests from your customers to enhance the author review feature than user reviews. With great reviews, your customers are generating revenue, yet it is just a block.
Also, how do you figure out what is popular? Is there any roadmap or anything your customers can vote on?

You really should stick to what you are, providing a newspaper theme and making that the best, easiest and leanest available. 100s of features will bloat it up and you can’t meet all requests. Your theme is called the newspaper and not any multipurpose theme. Trying to compete with premium plugins can only make it worse – for example directory plugin.

I was already really hesitant when I was forced to use your own composer instead of one of the three major ones. Why? Because if you keep loading up the theme with features that are not needed without the chance to deactivate them, I might have to switch the theme but that’s the problem. Since everything is built with TD composer, I have to start from scratch. Sure that is one way to retain your customer base.

How do you plan on moving forward?
As you mentioned you want to help your customers avoid paying for premium plugins by creating your own features in a theme. And I think that is the problem we see. You try to implement so many features from plugins but as you said, you are a small team. This results in half-baked features which are creating frustrations. And people are stuck with unnecessary code on their page just because of a couple of requests. I don’t want user reviews, how do I get rid of it?

See, I’m not trying to bash you guys, but trying to understand and of course, part of me is frustrated as well.
So what I would like to get some answers specifically are the following:

1. Author review – My number one feature request. Is that on your list? Are you guys working on the multiple requests to make author reviews much nicer and easier? This is a content piece that generates revenue for your customers. It has been brought up and we were asked to wait for the next update.

2. Feature turn-off. Since you are integrating more and more stuff, can we please make options in the theme panel that either disable certain features or you branch them out as your own plugins? In that way, the customer can decide what feature they need and load it as required.

3. More and fast bug fixing. There were lots of things going on with the review schema and not everyone was aware of the solution to delete something and reactivate again. Instead of providing a bug-fixing update, we have been asked to wait for the next update. As you mentioned, customers are generating revenue, we can’t wait for SEO impacting fixes for months.

4. Small feature updates. You don’t have to make huge update jumps, no Theme developer does that. Add a feature here and there but you don’t need to make everyone wait just to release an update with X new features which some of them might be buggy.

Thank you.

In addition to what I saw is that a lot of people are asking for more demos and designs. While I understand the request and the workload for you guys, on this specific point I want to ask for something different based on an example for post styles.

In legacy version we could just easily select between different post styles in an easy way. Now with cloud templates, we actively need to create a post style from scratch. This is not always easy and for some without a lot of knowledge in that area it might be too complicate and frustrating.

With some demos, you provide new post styles which we then can import to our cloud templates. However, this imports the whole page and design elements which is not matching the rest of the site.

So in order to help us out, it would be great to get kind of a framework or documentation of different post styles which we can then apply on a page of our own. In that way, it matches our design and we can set it up once. I hope this makes sense somehow.

I agree with few points regarding bugs, but I really appreciate Tagdiv team that is providing best possible options and features(I like paywall, directory system, howbe, some improvements needed to manage submission and data correctly) and if you are talking about performance optimization, adding new features newspaper theme is working very fine with performance. Yes, they can improve add more performance optimization options but they are trying best for updates and support.

I’d like to repeat only one of the feedback/requests listed above – please provide a toggle button to enable/disable “Reviews” element. Not every website using cloud templates will need it. It needlessly adds complexities to the dashboard.