Here is a new update regarding the SureDash development.
The last plugin update was on March 12th, 14 days ago.
The last written update with a video was March 7th, which was 19 days ago.
Elephant In The Room
Let me speak to the elephant in the room, development is clearly taking a bit longer than we expected. But let me explain that a bit.
When there is a delay, its because we are putting extra effort into making the product better. We are not sitting on our hands or putting fewer resources into the development.
Extra Effort 1: Performance
The first task that caused a delay was ensuring that we had performance figured out. This took us a month longer than we expected because we had to evaluate all the approaches and have a few proof of concepts. We also talked to multiple high end web hosts and developers of other similar products that had performance issues.
If we wanted to take the easy route, we could have made it so none of your plugins that render on the front end of your site would work. For example if you wanted to add a form to your SureDash, the easy route would be to make it so that you couldn’t do that, to completely bypass WordPress’s way of loading of content.
Whenever you add anything that loads on the front end of your site for a visitor, that plugin also loads the various assets it needs. The more you add, the more that needs to be loaded. This is a basic concept of how websites work.
But that was an approach that goes against what we are building. We are not building a one trick pony here, we are trying to build a community experience that can scale with you. Not just one piece.
So we spent more time on this.
Extra Effort 2: Layout Flexibility
The next thing that took more time was figuring out how we can enable users to completely change the layout of their SureDash.
One approach would be to have separate hard coded layouts, but we wanted to have a more flexible foundation where users could move anything around. Have complete freedom.
So we spent the time to have a better foundation where users have near complete control over the layout.
There are multiple benefits here.
For us, we have a better foundation to offer multiple layouts for your SureDash.
For users, you can move or remove anything you don’t want in your layout.
For teachers, you can create and share your own custom layouts.
Extra Effort 3: More Capable Comments
We were initially using the WordPress comment system, but kept hitting roadblocks when trying to add capabilities that we saw from user feedback here in the group.
This would be adding images, gifs, and videos into comments.
So we had to spend more time here to make sure that comments were more capable, which involved building a custom commenting system.
What We Are Working On Currently
Here is what our dev team is currently working on, and I will add more screenshots in the comments below.
Scaleable Color System
We just spent a ton of time perfecting our color system to be able to provide dark color schemes. Later we will add a front end color switcher.
The color system is very in depth to give you control over all the color details, hover colors, all the details.
Commenting Experience
We are refining the experience of adding images, gifs, and videos to comments. We have this working, but I was not happy with the UX so we have spent time to refine it.
Essentially we had a pop over for adding these, but the experience didn’t feel good, so we have been refining.
Admin Interface
Based on user feedback, users were having a hard time setting things up.
We took all the early user feedback and redesigned the user interface.
That new user interface is being built into the plugin. This work has been going on for some time because its also adding capabilities we didn’t intend on building initially. This is the space collections so that the front end UI would scale better.
SureMembers Compatibility
It goes without saying that these products need to work flawlessly together. This work is on going, but with a bunch of SureMembers enhancements to improve the experience.
First is a new UI that feel similar to SureDash.
Second, all protection option, styling, working as expected.
Third, a new feature to SureMembers to be able to display something different when someone does not have access. It can be a designed sales page or checkout page, whatever you want to display. And it can be designed from your page builder.
Prior you were limited to just displaying some text, a login button, a customizable button. But now you can display an entire designed page.
The reason this matters in the SureDash case is, if a user does not have access to a space, and they click into the space they don’t have access to, you can display a sales page or checkout for, whatever you want, right there. This is much better than a redirect because you leave them there in SureDash.
Also we have build something I am calling Dynamic Icons. In a simple sense, all spaces have an icon. With Dynamic Icons, SureMembers and any 3rd party plugin can change the space icon dynamically. So in the case of SureMembers, if a user does not have access to a space the icon will be changed to a lock. If a space is configured to drip feed, the icon will be changed to a clock.
Wrap Up
In retrospect, I think I unintentionally over promised and under delivered on the timeline of things. This is because of our quality standards and user feedback.
But in the end we will have under promised and over delivered on the quality and capabilities of SureDash once the final version is in your hands.
Our aim is to complete the release candidate version in April, but likely to be later in April.
