KoDan

So…… on 31/8 WPDM support does reply, saying they *had* read my posts but didn’t realise I had specific questions. OK, so on 1/9 I sent back a list of four quite specific questions regarding outstanding issues I have with the code.

It’s now been over a week with no reply?

Watch this space . grin.

A WPDM Review – what do I give it out of 10?

It’s a very fair review – if I had read it myself I still would still have likely bought the product and make that point. Can’t be fairer than that. I’ve again ‘invited’ wpdm to repond, although a response would be good it would also be bad……..

Don’t get me wrong, fundamentally it’s a really nice product. I’ve spent a month re-writing huge chunks of it so now it is really clean to use, with decent instructions, with *almost* all of the processing problems & glitches resolved. Still very server intensive, but I’ll deal with that. However I’m a web developer, so cleaning up the bugs with this code is surely way beyond many who purchase this product.

For a client installation, where they are urgently calling me when it goes awry, the level of support WPDM offer just makes this product way too much of a potential head-ache for use for a commercial WordPress application. I can’t wait a month for an answer to a technical problem.

Which is certainly *not* how it is marketed, and it’s a crying shame because the potential is right there.

What I find most annoying is that prior to purchasing, WPDM pre-purchase support was exceptional. Knowlegeable, helpful and responsive. But as soon as I purchased a license, any support just vanished. Sure, that business model is everywhere (take the money and run!) but that doesn’t make it more acceptable.

And that attitude just sums up the Support Forum, please just re-name a Public Forum, I think that is being far more honest.

I understand the economic questions for support, so I have pointed out to WPDM that they should simply charge a monthly support fee and provide ‘genuine’ support to those who are gladly paying for it. Win-Win. But of course they don’t read the Support Forums. LOL.

Since WPDM haven’t bothered to respond here is the content of my private message. IMHO you have to have financial calculations and record-keeping as both traceable AND un-arguable – of which it is currently neither.

Since my initial posts I have identified that the ‘User Role’ payouts do write these % values into the database (and the ‘global figure does as well). I didn’t notice it before because of a glitch where the ‘global’ figure does not display in the Admin Panel, so it looks like nothing is happening.

However it’s irrelevant, because the code still only uses these values to calculate User Commission’s in real-time – and that is the issue.

FWIW I have modifed the code to write the commission value into the database at the time of the sale and the code only ever uses these database values for working out the financial distibutions.

————PRIVATE REPLY POST BELOW ——————

FYI I didn’t want to make this public but IMHO the coding above is a REALLY BAD IDEA as it potentially leads to financial conflict between the seller and the site owner. Why? Two big reasons.

Reason 1.

Lets just say the site owner agress with sellers that they will charge 25% commision. Seller then proceeds to make $1000 of sales, therefore at this point the distribution is 750:250. Fine.

Then something happens at the site end – new hosting contract, software updates or simply a CPI increase and the site changes its commission to 30% BEFORE the Seller takes out their share. Because the site subsequently calculates this distribution on ‘real-time’ rather then historical commission percentage, the distribution now automatically changes to 700:300. Not fine.

I’m no lawyer but I suspect the site is LEGALLY obliged to pay the seller the $50 difference.

Even if the site is happy to pay the Seller the difference, because the commission percentages are set as either ‘global users’ or ‘user role’ level (ie not to a unique ID) AND it is a SINGLE value (ie no historical timeline stored), this makes it difficult to adjust the funds within the WPDM system.

I’ve already done testing where a change in the commission changes the seller’s balance to a negative number…….

Reason 2.

Taxation. Obviously taxation is based on income over a set financial year – the problem here is that I can change the income distributions for past taxation periods – I’m guessing the way it works now is that the changes go right back to Day One. This potentially creates such such a financial mess it’s not even worth discussing further, as the only way you would be able to correctly audit under such circumstances is by trying to recreate the timeline of commission percentage changes and seller withdrawals – which means you need to go through ALL site backups. Uurgh.

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For auditing I strongly recommend storing commission percentages as a historical timeline. Maybe the site does – as mentioned the Admin code isn’t working for me nor do I know where you are storing these in the DB.
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FYI I consider an order with ZERO commission as exactly that – I personally would *never* use code to re-calculate order information.
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BTW This isn’t a ‘horribly’ complicated coding change – as mentioned fortunately you already have the [site_commission] field which if used sensibly solves all of the above issues. Of course the ‘top’ level of the Sales pages show the calculated financial summaries BEFORE it loads the actual ORDER data, so there is still a bit of coding I need to do to re-arrange the layouts and the data hierarcy.

The coding edits are fine, however the bigger issue for me is that these aren’t files I can load into the child theme – so hopefully this is a ‘correction’ that you folks will put as reasonably urgent.

I can see in the code where the User Forms are written, but as there a quite a few of these the simplest solution to this problem is to catch it at the database INSERT/UPDATE. A simple IF statement would ensure that the record is always valid loading at the User end.

I can see this bit of text sits inside the ‘billing_info’ string, and yes, I think this all gets placed inside the ‘order_id’ array before writing to the database.

However despite spending quite a bit of time searching through both the ‘Download Manager’ and ‘WPDM Premium Packages’ folders I cannot find the piece of code that actually lets me insert this check.

In closing this problem really summarises the core problem with this product – and it has nothing to do with code.

Yes, this is an annoying glitch that has taken me a long time to isolate. However although the code fix is relatively simple, I still need some technical support from WPDM to identify the actual spot where I can insert the fix.

But you just do not get any technical support………

HeHe.

BTW sorry, I copied the wrong string into the ‘not-working’ data string above – the important part of the string is ;s:5:”state”;s:1:”1″; that was orginally ;s:5:”state”;s:0:”″; – it is the NULL field that causes the error. I wrongly copied the edited ‘fixed’ string…….

And just to make this all IT EVEN MORE ANNOYING, when a Guest has this Invoicing error they are advised to fix their billing details and presented with an [Edit Billing Details] window. But guess what….they CANNOT EDIT the State field. Yup, you can see it, it is marked as a required field, but it looks like when the loaded value is NULL then the input is disabled so you can’t type anything into it. Sigh.

It is also NOT related to the Country pull-down selection so you can’t load it from here either.

So no matter what changes a User makes to their Billing Details, it looks like once this error has occurred you can never get the Invoice to work unless you directly edit the database field.

NOTE 1. Even for valid orders, it is somewhat strange that although it is marked as a required field it can be left completely blank? Fortunately this does not load a completely NULL value into the record, instead it loads:

;s:5:”state”;s:0:””;

A great example of the difference in code that just one little space can make!

NOTE 2. Although a Guest User can change the Billing Details for an Invoice, it doesn’t appear that a logged in User has the same flexibility. These Orders do not get the [Edit Billing Details] button, nor does changing the User Profile:Billing Details have any effect on the Invoice.

Not being able to change Invoice details isn’t necessarily a huge issue, however it does mean that if a logged in User ‘does’ make an order with the Invoicing error, then they will ALSO never be able to correct it.

lol. The Taxes field shows just a ‘backslash’ by default, obviously this character isn’t being well handled by the forum code 🙂

I’m a web developer – so my issues are at the core level of the product design (and code). These have nothing to do with documentation (which is extremely poor) or conflict with other plugins or server set-up.

I share your pain, and yes the frustration stems from the fact that it is both reasonably-priced and a good idea. However IMHO I do not think you can effectively use this plugin if you are not a web developer OR have access to one. 🙁

Folks, I’m *really* after a bit of support here.

I have done an *awful* lot of investigation, code customisation and despite getting virtually no forum replies I have solved most of the issues myself and shared lot’s of information in the Forum about:

Customisation

• preventing users form seeing the WP Dashboard or Top Menu
• implementing a Menu ‘Logout’
• elegantly directing sellers > seller dashboard & users > user dashboard on login
• elegantly redirecting users to an information page if they do not have the correct permissions
• restricting display of Media Library files to just the authors
• restricting access to WP permalinks and direct file URL’s (ie. attached files in a package) to only registered users
• implementing a homepage text search
• using tax inclusive pricing
• forcing ALL users, no matter if they have selected a country, to be charged tax
• stopping sellers from seeing other seller products in the dashboard (ie. Latest Orders and Top downloads)

Code Anomolies

• identified why thumbnail generation fails
• identified a discrepancy in the way Coupon Discounts are presented
• identified an anomaly in the way seller commissions are calculated

IMHO this is all useful information for current users as well as for WPDM in considering future code patches & releases.

The only aspect of the site I’m still un-happy about is Billing Information.

It’s very frustrating that the Country > State pull-down code works perfectly in the Shopping Cart & the Premium Package Admin panel, but nowhere else in the site. This is especailly annoying for the end user, as this field can never be auto-populated.

You have already written the code, I have found the relevant code snippet and have inserted the code but it doesn’t work. I’d sort it myself but, unlike everything else I’ve sorted, I just can’t easily find where to hook it up to the required functions (I’m guessing js).

So I would REALLY appreciate some guidance here – it can’t be difficult.