Clearly powerful, but with some disappointment

  • rockso

    (@rockso)


    1 year, 7 months ago

    First off – this is not intended to be a wholly negative post. It’s clear that the plugin is EXCEPTIONALLY powerful… however, during testing of the plugin I came across three areas which IMHO should be addressed.

    My hope was to speed up my workflow when creating property listing sites, as ATM we build from the ground up using ACF. However…

    1) Clucky documentation … it takes a while to search the docs to find how to’s or why something is not working as expected. overall, on-site documentation in parts can be so sparse, we had to revert to Facebook groups or Reddit to find the answers we needed.

    2) Page builder centric … We predominantly use either the Kadence or Blocksy Pro themes, alongside Guttenberg blocks including block plugins from Kadence, Stackable etc. But its seems to be able to create something truly unique (visually) you have to use either Divi, Elementor or Bricks. While we do have a Elemento Pro licence, we have not built a new site with it since 2022, and we’re actively pushing what remaining clients we have using Elementor over to Block-based designs, hopefully by the end of 2025. We could create our own theme and script our own dynamic blocks, but that defeats the point of switching to speed up our workflow.

    3) Could not get Google maps API to work. I’m sure it’s a problem at our end, but we could not figure out what was going wrong, and searching the docs (point 1) became a PITA. It frustrates as we can connect using ACF or the Easy Property Listings plugin we’ve tested side by side.

    Overall, we could live with point 1, most plugins/themes are poorly documented (Kadence)… but to not natively support blocks or even the WP code dynamic block is truly disheartening, for such a powerful feature rich plugin…

    As it stands, we can recreate most of the features Hive offers with ACF/SCF and some customisations. But it take use approx 200 man hours…. This could have cut that down to 10 to 30 man hours.

    Hopefully, Hive will address the lack of block support in the future. Or have a solution for using the dynamic block, that we have missed.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Oliver Campion

    (@domainsupport)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    Hi,

    We also develop all our new sites with block themes and were also surprised to learn that Property Hive doesn’t support blocks.

    We contacted the developers on GitHub and they’ve confirmed that they have not yet started work on any Property Hive blocks and that if we develop our own plugin with Blocks to support Property Hive that “there’s no chance of conflict”.

    So that’s exactly what we are actively developing 🙂

    You can read the GitHub issue here for further information.

    Oliver

    Plugin Author Property Hive

    (@propertyhive)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    Hi all,

    @rockso – Thanks for your feedback. I wanted to address your queries, not only for your benefit, but for anybody else that might read this review.

    Docs: Appreciate the feedback on this. Our docs were revised earlier in the year and moved over to a newer platform. This was a big improvement in terms of look and feel from what was there before, but we are aware we’ve got a long way to go. We are looking at adding more docs with videos etc and this will of course be an ongoing process.

    Our whole ‘help and support’ notion is actually undergoing a bit of a transformation at the moment. Just this morning we released version 2.1.0 which has a bunch of new helpful resources inside the plugin itself including a help tab on all Property Hive screens and a nice step by step tour when you go to add your first property, to name but a few. Ease of use and onboarding is at the forefront of our efforts in the coming weeks.

    Block support: As @domainsupport has said, we don’t support any block integration at the moment and it sounds like they’re having a crack at this which is great. This is a great example of why Property Hive is open source; so anybody can contribute. We look forward to seeing what’s done here and I’ll be in touch with Oliver as it would be great to collaborate on this further.

    Google Maps API Key issues: Sorry to hear you had issues with this. 99% of the time with Google Maps queries it’s related to the API key and restrictions being applied. It also depends on which add ons you’re using as to whether you need one or 2 separate Google Maps API keys setting up (one for JS, one for geocoding). Without knowing more about your scenario it’s hard to comment but if I can assist with this at all, or anybody else reading this reply, please always feel free to reach out to us at info@wp-property-hive.com where we’ll be happy to help.

    Steve

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

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