I Want to Upgrade, but ….

[DFJ]

From everything it claims, this is THE plugin that I’ve been looking for, BUT in demoing the free version, some very basic functionality seems broken. I’d be more than happy to shell out the money for the pro version of this plugin, but I can’t justify the cost if certain things don’t work.

1. The plugin breaks XML site maps. This bug is mentioned on the WordPress.org plugin support forums:
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/snap-messes-up-my-xml-sitemaps
I also use Yoast for SEO, so this is an immediate deal breaker. “It’ll be fixed in the next release” is the response, so already, I can’t use this plugin without potential SEO impact. Instead, I’ll have to wait for the next release to see if this in fact is fixed.

2. Enabling auto-repost for Twitter is still buggy in version 3.0.9. I fought, and fought with getting this working, then finally, I clicked on the “set all existing posts to “enabled for repost” (which is a fix from the 3.06 version) for like the 3rd or 4th time, and finally the feature started working – which introduced another headache …

3. Link shortening: I have existing bitly links for my current posts, and have plugged in my API info to use my bitly account so that the plugin can grab my existing short links, as well as create bitly links for new posts. I set my Message text format to use %TITLE$ %SURL% so that it uses *my* shortened link. Well, it kind of works, BUT each post has a setting called “URL to use for links, attachments and %MYURL%:” which is set to Auto by default. So that means that my aforementioned template works, but it also adds the long URL of each post in the repost, resulting in my tweets having two links – one short, one long. There seems to be no way to disable this auto setting globally, and unchecking the box for auto on each post doesn’t “stick.” If I uncheck auto, it just reverts back to checked. Very annoying, and the double links are very messy looking on Twitter.

I typically post to my blog from a third party application, and schedule posts weeks if not months ahead, so a template that uses ONLY my shortened link is what I need, otherwise I’ll have to log into the blog dashboard each time I create a new post to try and fix the short URL/long URL mess – which defeats the main purpose of me using a third party app for creating new posts.

I’ve only barely demoed this plugin and feel that these are significant usability flaws. If I go forward with the implementation, I’m afraid I’ll find more.

I would be more than happy to upgrade to the pro version of this app, and am very eager to do so, but these flaws are deal breakers for me as I’m sure they are for others. Come on guys, this is at version 3.x so these fundamental bugs should have been ironed out long ago, and after reading on the support forums, it seems that these recent patch level versions are being shoved out very hastily without being fully tested. Quality should be job one if you’re going to charge money for this plugin. Can we please have a fully tested, super stable release?

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