Transcript Of This Video

[00:00:00.11]
In this video, I want to talk to you about WP Grid Builder. Now, this is a pretty popular plugin, I think, with regard to creating post-grids of custom post types with custom fields on there and taking a lot of really cool control over the way those things look on your site. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work the way that I intended it to make it work. And not only that, more importantly, my experience dealing with the developer wasn’t all that great and left a bit of sour taste in my mouth. And so I just feel like I should talk about it. Now, I want to be clear here at the outset, I’m not intending for this video to be a review. It’s definitely not going to be a tutorial. I’m not going to sit here and walk you through what WP Grid Builder would do. I just want to just sit here and talk about my experience using it, which I was not successful with. Okay? And I want to be also clear, it may not actually be a problem with the plugin because it could be unique to my particular site setup. It could be something that perhaps I was overlooking.

[00:01:12.17]
The problem is I couldn’t figure it out because the developer was really not very helpful at all. So here’s basically what happened. I’m trying to create a video gallery, so to speak, on BlockMarketing Academy, and I have one now, and I’ve got these YouTube channels, but I’m trying to bring everything into one central library, and I have some custom things that I want to put in place for people to be able to search through the different videos that I’ve made, both members only and public. I’ve got the custom post type all created with advanced custom fields. Looks really nice, actually, but I was trying to get the grid part to have a little bit more control with the way that it displays, and not only that, with what’s called facets. I wanted to be able to have the video library be searchable, filterable, things like that. And so I looked into options. I looked at the Cadence system with the advanced Query Builder that it has in there, and I can get fairly close, but it doesn’t have all the ability to do some of the customizations. I’ve also looked at Facet WP. I’ve worked with that in the past.

[00:02:16.12]
I was successful with it. The thing is, it’s really nerdy. The interface isn’t all that great. It’s a little bit too lean and mean in some ways. And in order to really get more nitty-gritty with I’d have to dive into the code, and I don’t want to. With WP Grid Builder, it looks like it has a much nicer user interface. It does, actually. You can build your cards with basically a block builder. It just looked like it would be easier to use, and it probably is, honestly. So I bought it. Then what happened was that I could not get it to work as intended. First of all, being that I used the cadence theme, If I want to use these facets and stuff on my archives of custom post types, then basically I have to get into it creating a child theme and coding an archive template, and I don’t want to do it. The whole point of using some of these tools is that I should not have to do stuff like that. It takes time, and I don’t want to deal with it. It looks to me that if I was using a page builder like Bricks or Elementor or something like that, it It would be maybe easier.

[00:03:31.21]
But I’m using Cadence, and it’s a good tool, and I don’t want it to switch tools just for the sake of this grid. Now, Grid Builder does have Gutenberg blocks to stick them onto a page, and you’re supposed to be able to take control of it that way. And that’s what I tried to do. I tried to put it on there, and I got the grid to work. It looked fine. The problem was I couldn’t get the facets to work properly. I had one or two It was a facet that simply would not show up, even though I could go into the database and I could see that it was indexing things. It should be functional. It should be showing up. It was a facet that was supposed to show a custom taxonomy and that type of thing. The other thing is that when I put a search facet on there, it would not pull up stuff, even though it’s clearly there. When I used page numbering, it would show stuff that wasn’t even there, it wasn’t part of the grid. So I’m thinking, well, maybe I’ve got a query conflict there. Actually, I could still have a query conflict there.

[00:04:35.16]
I don’t really know. I tried to get help to figure out what it is. When I pay for a license to one of these plugins, support is the primary thing that you’re paying for. So I went there and I tried to get help from the developer. His name is Loek. He’s the guy who not only supports the plugin, but I think he’s also the guy that created it. And it didn’t go very well. It It really didn’t go very well. Now, along with this video, I’m going to do a full write-up on, and I’m not going to get into every little nitty-gritty. I’m also not here to badmouth Loic. At the end of the day, he’s probably a very good developer. Kudos to him for creating this product. I know I couldn’t have done it. But his support skills leave something to be desired, because basically what was going on is that he didn’t seem to actually look at the data that I was giving him. I know what I’m doing in most aspects, but I’m trying not to have to dive into every little nitty-gritty thing to create a simple grid and to have it be sortable.

[00:05:45.03]
I don’t want to have to hand code stuff. Anyway, I go to him and I’m going to say, Well, this isn’t working. Maybe you can help me find my blind spot. What am I missing here? The summary version is this. He just simply wouldn’t really look. He would give me some placeholder information. He’d link off to the documentation, and then that was it. Then when I could get that he wasn’t clearly understanding what I was talking about, I recorded a quick loom video video, which is something I do with my clients all the time. Most people appreciate it because it’s clearly way more descriptive and saves us a lot of time. Well, he wouldn’t even watch the Loom video. He basically told me, That’s not going to work. Stick to writing and taking a bunch of screenshots. I’m like, Okay, well, that’s time consuming. I did it. I tried to describe to him what I’m seeing. He kept saying the facet settings were not right, so I’d take screenshots of it, and then he’d point out some other thing that wasn’t in the screenshot, but I know it has nothing to do with it. I was running this dance, and it just didn’t seem like he actually wanted to find a solution.

[00:06:57.27]
It seemed as if he was trying to make me go away. At one point, at the final, I was like, I’m just going to give you a login to the site. So I created a temporary admin login, and to have him just go in there. I briefly summarized, again, what the problem I’m seeing is. I wanted him to go in there and look at the facet settings himself because he seems to be so preoccupied with these facet settings and look like, Okay, do you see anything in there? Well, he wouldn’t do that either. I think he went into the site one time, saw that there were other plugins there, and then proceeded to tell me to deactivate everything except for advanced custom fields and grid builder. Well, this is a live website. I can’t just turn everything off like that. But not only that, I feel like the guy’s treating me like an idiot because I debug people’s sites all the time for clients, and these are live sites as well. And the last thing I would do is tell them to turn everything off. Again, it’s putting all the load on the client. Now, I know I’m not his client, but I did pay for a support license, and it just didn’t seem as if the guy was trying to fix anything or to help me find what I might be missing.

[00:08:16.01]
Because obviously, if I can figure out how to use this plugin nicely, I’m going to use it on client sites and stuff. I’m going to spread the word. But that doesn’t seem to be his interest. He was basically trying to get me to go away. I It felt like he was giving me these cookie cutter responses. So I was like, Okay, fine. After a bunch of back and forth on that, I was like, This clearly isn’t going to work. My time is valuable, and I’m not going to spend more time trying to debug this. I’ll move on to another solution. And so I decided to ask for a refund. I was nice about it, but it was just clearly I wasn’t going to get anywhere with support. Well, he denied the refund. I was I’m like, Seriously? I honestly did not expect that one at all. Well, come to find out, they have only a 14-day refund period. I think I was on day 19 or something like that, maybe 20. He denied the refund because I was not within the refund period. Well, all right. I didn’t realize that. That’s a really short refund period.

[00:09:25.10]
But that being said, it clearly was his policy, so I decided not to fight But at the end of the day, I told him, Listen, all you needed to do was look and try to help me out. And I also said, I think you’re being a little short-sighted here. But he came back and said, No, we have to turn off all the plugins, blah, blah, blah. Basically, he was treating me like I’m a customer of HostGator or something. I don’t know what the heck I’m doing. And I’m like, That’s fine. At the end of the day, my time is too valuable to chase this guy down for 200 bucks. I got There are things to do. It’s not that big of a deal, but whatever. I’m not going to not make this video about it. At the end of the day, when I go to WP Gridbuilder on YouTube and I’m looking, I see a sponsored video series showing people how to use it. I see a few reviews, whatever. What I don’t see is a whole lot of real-world experience about it, and that’s my real-world experience. I will say the plugin is tougher to use than it looks.

[00:10:29.15]
While it does have a fairly nice user interface, I can’t sit here and tell you it’s very user friendly. I think the documentation, it just shows you the basics, but it doesn’t go into any particular scenarios. It doesn’t help the person debug anything. And then it goes into all the developer hooks and all that. I’m like, Well, I don’t want to deal with that. If I have to start hand coding my templates, what’s the point of this damn plugin? And then on top of that, when you go to get help, Sometimes the developer is not the person who should be doing support. I understand that they know the product the best, but there’s a two different skill sets. Sometimes the developer isn’t the best at customer relations. That’s what it is with Loic. He wasn’t rude. He just came off as a little bit arrogant, like I was being annoying to him. Clearly, his goal was just to kick out an email reply to me and not really solve the problem. It He was just trying to get me to go away. I will give him credit. His responses were pretty quick. He usually replied back to me in 20 to 30 minutes.

[00:11:38.15]
If you want fast support, you’re probably going to get it with WP Gridbuilder. But if you want it to be good support by somebody who’s actually trying to help you out, you may not get it from Loic. That’s my experience. That’s what it is. I basically pay $200 to realize that Gridbuilder was not the tool that I would want to be because I’m not going to get the help I need when a problem arises. Basically, I needed it to work with the Cadence team. It should work with the cadence theme, but I couldn’t get it to happen. It may still, to this day, be something fairly simple. I just needed a little help to find it, and then I’d probably be off to the races because I’m not a newbie at this stuff. But I don’t want to deal with somebody like Loek. He just didn’t seem like he cared that much. So whatever, I stopped caring, too.