Last week at work we released a major update to one of our products. We also released a premium version of the same plugin. Unfortunately we are experiencing some growing pains because of the complexity of the two products. Certain users are experiencing conflicts with other software on their websites.
Unlike some of our competitors, both in the WordPress and outside of WordPress, they have a lot less to worry about.
Competitor A also creates software for WordPress. However, their user base is much smaller than ours. In addition, their software is not as dynamic as ours.
Competitor B released an update to their software, but they are not WordPress based and do not have to worry about varying servers and other software conflicting. All they have to worry about is fixing their own design flaws.
Both A & B have less to worry about. Fortunately and unfortunately for us, with over 7 million downloads, we have a lot of users to worry about. 7 million downloads also means many languages, many servers, many plugins and many themes.
With all that said, for the first time at my career with Photocrati I have been helping out with the support inbox. Normally the most customer service I do is replying to social media support questions directing them to the appropriate documentation or to the support request forms.
The past two weeks has been pretty intense and I’m sure next week will be the same. Yesterday we updated both of the 2 software mentioned above to address the bulk of the wide-spread conflicts. However, there will still be some users that will experience issues which we still need to address.
From a WordPress consumer standpoint I understand their concerns and have been there.
From an advanced WordPress user standpoint, I hope that people read what issues were addressed and resolved before updating with the mindset that everything will magically work for them. I also hope people understand that they have to clear their website cache and browser cache after updating.
Anyway.. small rant and update on how the past couple weeks have been for me and for the rest of the team.
