Brilliant ideas, but not for everyone

  • dacai

    (@dacai)


    10 years, 9 months ago

    After playing around with this plugin since one of the earliest versions, i believe i can now write a balanced review. Let me start by saying that my 3 star rating is meant for what i consider the average wordpress user. Add one star if you have a firm grasp of wordpress/css. Add another if you are a veteran php coder.

    Identity

    WordPress achievements offers a lot (and i do mean a lot!) of functions to offer your users rewards for nearly anything they do on your site. Is this a good thing? In general…yes. The downside is that the plugin often feels like it’s struggling to decide on it’s target audience. Is it meant for e-learning? Is it a loyalty reward system? Well, it’s a little bit of both and master of neither.

    Buddypress

    The plugin was originaly designed around use with buddypress. After the 3.0 update/rebuild it will now also function without. One thing missing from the new versions is the ability to reward users based on activity in specific groups. From a loyalty reward perspective this is not a big deal, but it cripples it’s purpose for e-learning environments. It is also about the only thing missing, so if you don’t need it and use buddypress you will be happy with the plugin.

    Without Buddypress

    Without Buddypress a few functions will likely feel missing, foremost the lack of ability to view the achievements of other users (or even your own without the wordpress admin bar, although this is easily fixed with a minor code change). Users like to show of their earned rewards…and they can’t.

    Support

    Support is fast and good (if sometimes touchy) and the plugin is unlikely to be deserted. A lot of support issues actualy deal with customization (which is sometimes neccecary to implement funtions that should be present in the plugin to start with), and Paul is always willing to point users in the right direction. That direction often requires a hefty amount of coding knowledge on the side of the user.

    Style

    Out of the box the plugin looks ok (not great). It will require some styling to fit your site. This styling will need to be done in css, the plugin does not provide dashboard styling options.

    Is it for you?

    Well, that’s a tough one to asnwer. If you need something that works out of the box and is easy to style/customize…no, it’s not for you. If you need a robust framework that can do nearly anything(and you are willing to learn coding / hire someone else to do it)…yes, this plugin is for you (don’t look any further, you will find none better).

    If you are coming from a customer/user reward perspective…maybe, it will suffice (but there are other specialist plugins to consider). If you are coming from an online learning perspective…another maybe (you will find a lot of needed functionality missing without complex customization, but there are no real alternatives for use with wordpress).

    Final thoughts; personal experience

    My personal experience with the plugin has been bitter-sweet and outright frustrating. It places my very ideal of a wordpress based learning environment at my fingertips…but due to the believe of the plugin’s author places in the technical emancipation of it’s users the realisation of my vision continues to linger just outside my reach.

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  • Plugin Author Paul Wong-Gibbs

    (@djpaul)

    10 years, 8 months ago

    Hi dacai,

    I appreciate your detailed feedback. Thanks for taking the time to write it up.

    I just want to reply to two of your comments to help explain my decisions in the plugin on those things for a counterpoint to people who consider using the plugin in the future.

    The plugin was originaly designed around use with buddypress. After the 3.0 update/rebuild it will now also function without. One thing missing from the new versions is the ability to reward users based on activity in specific groups.

    Yes. I believe the plugin has now about matured enough to let me start re-integrating bits like this back deeper into BuddyPress. It’s definitely important to me. Achievements will always work best with BuddyPress, so this needs to/will get done.

    Without Buddypress a few functions will likely feel missing, foremost the lack of ability to view the achievements of other users.

    Per your comment about the toolbar items, it is possible to view the achievements of other users… once you figure out the URLs and add custom links into your theme. 🙂

    It’s a tricky problem for me to deal with because WordPress fundamentally doesn’t have user profiles. When the plugin isn’t used with BuddyPress, I kind-of implement a very basic user profile (using the post author archive URLs) in order to give me a place to display a user’s achievement.

    I think as I get time to add more documentation, this will become easier for people to be aware that they’ll need to do some theme customisations to expose the psuedo-user profiles if they aren’t also using BuddyPress. I don’t currently have any ideas how to improve the visibility of the psuedo-user profiles for non-BuddyPress users, but I’m always listening and thinking on this.

    Again, thanks for the feedback!

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