Hardcoded CSS
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PS. I should say this review is purely to do with CSS – the plugin itself is quite good IMO. If you don’t need to customise the styling you could safely use this
As has been said here before ( over a year ago btw ) – the plugin is pretty good but the styles have !important all over the place and in general the plugin seems to want to take 100% control of all the styles – making it basically useless if you want to use it as part of a proper design. I confess to useing !important a fair bit when I shouldn’t – it’s hard to avoid 100% – so I’m not like the CSS police or anything but this completely takes the proverbial biscuit. It took me 2 hours of writing THE most grotesque styles I’ve ever written 🙂 to make it bend to my will. Really bad for even a free plugin but the paid for one is what I was using.
Authors please don’t ask me waste my time following up on this – just please learn how to write CSS properly. You obviously know how to write js a lot better than I do but the CSS is a real problem to be honest[links removed]
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Guys what you’re describing IS bad CSS = adjusting your plugin to cover bad coders is not something you should be doing. I’m by no means an expert in this but I can assure you if you do a bit of study you’ll find using !important as much as you have is VERY bad practice, ESPECIALLY in a piece of software that other people are using. Writing more bad code to cover other peoples bad code is like saying two wrongs will make a right – but it doesn’t. In my case I have to ( and I mean I literally have no choice in the matter ) write REALLY bad code just to overwhelm your bad code which you wrote to overwhelm the actual bad code. You should be writing to best practices and if the plugin displays wrong then tell your clients to get a proper theme. I basically NEVER give bad reviews but that code cost me a lot of time yesterday in my business and you already had someone comment on this a year and a half ago. Trust me yes the css coding on most plugins is pretty bad but it’s usually workable. Sorry but not a chance I can let this pass. And by the way calendar themes are completely useless wrt fixing this issue. The cascading style sheets need to be actually cascade-able but in your case you’ve taken them out of the flow – no amount of themes will ever fix that. I need to be able to apply my own custom theme via css – the themes might be good for amateurs but I’ve never seen one that actually got me what I wanted really. Sorry that this hurts you but the primary reason I decided to do a review rather than write a support comment or email you is that I see you were informed about this issue a year ago and didn’t seem to understand the problem then you were actually basically asking the guy to help you see the problem when he just told you what it was and suggesting some kind of “Custom CSS” thing ( to fix the actual CSS you broke !! ) https://wordpress.org/support/topic/functionally-is-great-customization-is-frustrating/
I don’t know what you mean – there are 138 instances of !important in 135 lines of CSS in the wpbs-calendar.css – that’s a world record by anyone’s standards if you ask me – contrast that with 8 instances in a three thousand line file from another plugin I just grabbed … none of the other plugins that I’ve used ( and I’ve used hundreds over the years ) use CSS anything like yours – you don’t need all those !important – just get proper specificity going – like maybe #wpbs-form-form instead of .wpbs-form-form if you really have to go that route – the vast majority are able to do it right to some extent – if it was utopia to expect everyone to keep to their own lane of the road then you should not be driving on it . It doesn’t need to be perfect – Anyway you can believe what you want. As regards a blank theme it would be of no use if it was completely blank because surely that would break the basic calendar itself ( which would be an instance where you could be justified using some !important – but you use them on the form as well of course ) – but if you had a theme that had no !importants in it at least for the form then that would be good. Better still have a “nuclear bomb” theme like you have now and then a regular theme – and if someone is using some crazy theme that itself uses 100s of !importants I suppose you could tell them to use the nuclear version. Tbh you don’t seem to really get this whole issue – I very much doubt this will be the last issue you have with someone like me coming along and telling you off about !important – it would be in your best interest to get rid of it all since it’s a commercial venture for you. That’s why I’m suggesting the alternative route. Changed from two stars to three btw and softened the title
Custom CSS boxes are always handy to have if it’s not a big deal to put them in but I think most people will have either a child theme or a box in their theme – but obviously a lot of people wont so I suppose it’s handy to have. I think though your color customisation will cover what 90% of amateurs want to do and as long as you leave the css fairly open any pro can manage with whatever is presented – I’m using the custom css box on the theme a lot lately if the theme gives it rather than bothering doing a child theme but the one I use mainly ( AVADA ) has a fairly half decent editor in it – otherwise I’d personally prefer to use sublime so I could see what I was doing and then put it in just a css file
To be honest 90% of the reason I even bothered with customisation was the booking form style was in my opinion a bit dated. If you had a couple of modern themes for that ( specifically a full width option was what I needed to do myself ) then that might be good; as long as they were either overwritable or pretty generic – preferably the former- particularly with regard to the typography, colors and button styling which are the main things someone would need to change to get it to match the host website.
I think the plugin deserves 5 stars aside from the way the css is – I’d be more than happy to change it to 5 if my issue with the CSS was covered somewhat.
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