For the last three years Thrive themes updates have constantly lost thousands of hours for its customers.
And I have written already about how to survive these updates (and you save at least $1000 for your business, if you value your time at $50/hr)
It’s happened recently with their 2.1.0 “just user interface update”.
And now, I don’t know if you noticed, you cannot download their themes and plugins anymore. You need to download a “product manager” plugin and then that in turn manages download and install of all their other plugins.
This isn’t wrong.
Many companies do it.
Its a great way to track installs and find out about the misuse of their licenses.
It even makes it easy for users to install just one plugin instead of their many plugins.
But…
There is a better way to do it, that many companies already do.
It goes something like this.
- Release a new feature (in this case, the new plugin)
- Make an announcement to the users – blog post, email list, social media, website ribbon/banner.
- Put up a notice on the download section of the website that – the direct-download method will become unavailable at a future date. And ask users to start adopting the new plugin which makes their life lot easier.
- Let the users use it, report bugs. If it doesn’t work, they can still download the older way for some time.
- Once everything is stable, eventually remove the direct-download option.
- Nobody gets hurt, everybody wins.
This is not rocket science. Software has been done this way for ages now. Its called deprecating a feature, then make it obsolete. Companies should care about testing properly. Companies should care about backward compatibility.
Ffs, even Apple is making their operating system updates to improve speeds of their older Macbooks now. (I just updated to Mojave on my Early 2014 Macbook Air and love it 🙂
A new big announcement
So all this while this email list has been the only way to interact between you and me. Now you can also
- Interact with other members on this email list
- Get free fast support from me and few other thrive themes experts when you run into problems
- Help other thrive themes customers yourself when they run into problems
How? Simple. I am launching a Facebook group where you can get all of this.
- Strictly no spam. Spammers will be removed with a 2-strike system. Spam will be deleted asap.
I am looking forward to all of you joining it today.
Click here to join the new free facebook group for thrive themes users.