Compatibility issues.

  • Resolved Ward

    (@yward)


    3 years, 1 month ago

    This was meant to be sent as a ticket but your website doesn’t accept tickets if the license is expired.
    License key can be emailed to your upon request or check ATUM website under username: Ward.

    Hello,​

    We own product levels up to version 1.5.7, however for some reason whenever you guys update the wordpress.org ATUM you change the code to break compatibility with older addons and I’m not even saying old as in full version old, literally 0.0.1 difference would destroy ones website. I can understand refactoring every major WP release or when new performance gains are there. but you seem to do it just for the sole purpose of breaking addons.

    This incident happened at least 4 times in the past 6 months. Each time for a different client of ours, we advise they buy an ATUM addon, the 3 months license; for the website we’re making them and almost as soon as the 3 months are over you change the free ATUM plugin code to break compatibility and our paid addon. Clients call us saying the website broke. Each time we just asked them to renew ATUM addon license and fix the issue. And now less than 2 month after the last “refactoring” mania you break yet another website of ours which license is listed above.

    We’re truly considering an alternative with more stable update process.

    If we bought the product once, we’d buy again if needed but the practice itself of breaking compatibility with no reason just to force resubscription is not ethical.

    Please tell us the last ATUM version compatible with product levels 1.5.7 which we bough as easily proven by our license found above. doing this “refactoring” trick every few releases breaks 100s of live websites that may be using your plugin. and is generally a bad programming practice, backward compatibility is essential or gradual changes, it took wordpress 3 major releases to update something as silly as jQuery and you somehow have the ability not through a major release, nor a minor update but literally by a small patch update, i.e. 0.0.1 to break entire websites just to force resubscription with no new features or added value to the new code.

    When we update our website only to be stuck debugging for hours to find it’s your plugin rampaging and slowing down the website and causing “Order screen” to take almost a full minute to load after we click “update” is truly a horrible experience, not an incentive to renew license unlike what you’d believe 🙂

    Regards,

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Author Stock Management Labs

    (@stockmanagementlabs)

    3 years, 1 month ago

    Hi @yward ,

    Thank you very much for your post.

    This is Pavel, the founder of ATUM, I would like to take the responsibility to reply to your message.

    I understand that users want to keep an older version of premium add-ons and of course is your full right. However, we are not to blame for any changes and updates to these new versions.

    Remember, ATUM is not a standalone plugin and such we have to keep up with every change WP or WooCommerce takes.

    You have decided to use WP in your business or personal site and when you did that you have decided to use 3rd party add-ons. These add-ons relate to the WP installation and as well as with the Apple app-store, when a new version is out all the apps need to make sure is in sync with the new changes. Mostly new version will not have such change that it will break sites, but when WP or WC releases any big update, the change in our plugin is necessary.

    You should not update your new version of WP unless all your plugins are in sync and support the new version. You should run a separate site (staging site) and test all the updates and changes to your site. Only when all works you should do the change in your live site. You can ask anyone, this is the only recommended practice.

    I understand your frustration, but one reason we ask for users to pay for some premium add-on is that we need to keep working on it dayily to make sure it works with every version of WP and WC.

    Every change of any plugin is marked within its log so pls check what was done in WP, WC or ATUM for that matter.

    I am very sorry, but if you want to keep your site in perfect shape, you must do the above. You will never have to debug yourself if you follow this practice.

    Hope this makes sense.

    Pavel

    Thread Starter Ward

    (@yward)

    3 years, 1 month ago

    Thank you for your response Pavel,
    I’m a developer as well so I do understand the need for constant updates, my concern here is the functionality-breaking updates. At least a warning before major changes is welcome.

    For example almost every Woocommerce update that has core changes that could break other plugins or integrations gives you a warning message “this is a major update, back up your site …etc”. I believe this has more to do with your version numbering than with the updates themselves, you push the major changes as minor patches not new versions.

    We do our tests and upgrades in staging websites, but the whole point of staging is to debug before pushing to live and this is where we found the issue mentioned here.

    I do check the changelogs, hence my note about the “refactoring” thing. Basically every time you have “refactoring” in your changelog it means it most likely will break compatibility with addons.

    I’m not in the position to tell you how to manage your own plugin, it’s an open source project and we appreciated you sharing it with the community via wordpress.org, my concern was with your update process and what I think is safe to say “unnecessary” refactoring. Woocommerce for example which ATUM here extends keeps deprecated functions working for a long time after they’ve been changed to allow devs to rewrite their code to the new functions. A similar practice for ATUM would be welcome.

    Anyhow, I do believe this discussion would go no where, as it’s your business model/choice, and I’m in no position to suggest you change that. Just take this as a recommendation.

    We’ll get yet another license but as someone who’s been using ATUM for my own projects and clients for 2+ years, I truly wish you take into consideration my recommendation.

    I understand it’s hard to maintain paid plugins with all the illegal/nulled sharing platforms and your change would make sense to render those useless, but your change is damaging paying customers too which is why I do not think it’s a good idea.

    I’ll just go ahead and mark this as solved, there is not much more than can be said in this thread.

    Have a good day,

    Plugin Author Salva Machi

    (@salvamb)

    3 years, 1 month ago

    Hi @yward

    It’s not just a matter of deprecated functions nor breaking changes. We always ensure that our plugins are 100% compatible with WooCommerce and WordPress (and not only the latest versions, also some older ones). But the problem with ATUM premium add-ons is that they use ATUM as their core and their versions need to be in sync to avoid problems.
    You are free to avoid updating the premium add-ons if you wish but if you want to avoid problems like these you mention, We’d recommend not updating ATUM either. So always updating all of them (ATUM and premium add-ons) at the same time is our recommendation.
    I also understand what you mean about versioning but, technically, we aren’t introducing any breaking changes here (bearing in mind that ATUM + all its add-ons should be treated as a unique system and not separated ones). So makes no sense to switch to a major version, just because we added a new method to an ATUM class in order to improve something.

    Additionally to the above, if you decide to still use older ATUM versions, you know that you could be open to bugs, security issues and also would miss new features that we add in every new version.

    I hope you understand this 😉

    PS: regarding your question about the ATUM version that matches better with every ATUM premium add-on, you just have to open the premium add-on’s main file and check the “MINIMUM_ATUM_VERSION” constant.

    Kind Regards,
    Salva.

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Salva Machi.
    Thread Starter Ward

    (@yward)

    3 years, 1 month ago

    Hello Salva,
    Thank you for your response. I do completely understand what you mean and agree as well about versioning rationale from your side. I believe you did get my point as well. It’s not necessarily about those classes changes it’s about about how often they change or whether that change was necessary.

    Your point about security/bugs is 100% valid but as you can imagine production websites do not update often unless a crucial vulnerability or bug is found. So a lot of the times we’re jumping a few release when we do our monthly maintenance/update cycles not just a single release.

    Thank you for the civil discussion. I’ll make sure to keep ATUM/Addons versions in sync going forward.

    We’ve been advocating for ATUM since we used it but we won’t be a good advocate if we didn’t mention the negatives along with the positive 🙂

    Have a good day!

    Plugin Author Salva Machi

    (@salvamb)

    3 years, 1 month ago

    Hi @yward

    Yes, I completely understand your point of view and understand that some production sites aren’t updated until the updates are well tested on staging sites. This is a way to know if there are breaking changes or conflicts arise, etc.
    But I hope you are with me that is dangerous to directly update a production site without testing before or updating some plugins and not others.

    I’m happy to know that you are enjoying ATUM and we expect you’ll be using it for years. There is a lot more to come… 😉

    Thanks a lot and have a nice day!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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