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The Ultimate News Plugin is NOT worth at all. - Ultimate News 1.01 | Forum

Ebony Wood
Ebony Wood Aug 28 '13
This Plugin is a very good idea. Evidently the Author of this plugin has put a lot of effort in it.  But it is not yet worth $40 at all! At most even $15 is a high price to pay for this plugin. The plugin is very similar in operation and features to the $10 Auto-blogger plugin, and also uses RSS feeds to collect, aggregate and store then display articles and blogs on intended website

These are some things that need fixing or improvement.
1 - It has no widget to display news articles on the home front page. News can only viewed by clicking the 'News' Link from the main menu. Its widget is only found on the news page. (unless of course the user knows how to create this plugin widget on home front page. I dont know how to do that)

2 - It is supposed to display the new NEWS articles on the home page's Newsfeed, but it does not work 80% of the time. So new news articles are not being displayed on the home page.

3 - I had thought that because this plugin was $40, it had the ability to collected photos from NEWS articles as well. But it does not collect photos. I wish it did. But I understand the process can be complicated.

4 - ***SEO integration is poor and needs more work. The website title and article category title does not show on search engines. Only the article's title shows and yet it contains the name of original website which it was aggregated from. This is bad considering I would want to promote my website not the other website. Even the bread crumb view sometimes does not show category title for certain articles or it is completely missing for some articles. I will try it farther and comment some more later.

5 - One can not delete category image, you can only upload another.
6 - When requesting plugin to get Articles, one cannot set the number of article to be fetched. It is hard coded to fetch 10 articles. So if ever you want to fetch present and past articles from another content provider you can only fetch 10 of them. So forget the idea of building content on your website by fetching previous articles. There after it can only fetch new articles created. What a bummer. (I understand that attempting to fetch too many articles at one time can crush the script but it would be nice to give that option)

6 - Then there is of course the problem of fetching articles from web sites that use article description paragraph and a 'more...' link for the rest of the article.
This plugin will not be able to fetch the rest of the article after the 'more...' link.
Then there are websites that use blogging format. So for this plugin, the 'description' field will be left blank. Oh well its hard to resolve this.

7 - Overall there is nothing of great standing in the $40 ultimate news plugin compared to the $10 auto-blogger plugin.  It really does not justify the $40 dollars. It needs more work!
YouNetCo
YouNetCo Aug 28 '13
Ebony Wood,


Thanks for your detail feedback, we really appreciate. The feedback is very detail and we learn a lot.

It seems some of your points are already covered by Ultimate News, such as:

1. Widget on Homepage, it could be done via small custom work. 

2. 3. Get Full news content including Photo --> it seems that you have not setup cronjob to run News Phase Service, which is a key feature of Ultimate News

4. URL and Breadcrumb are being improved to match each other in order to improve SEO performance 

5. We are not quite sure about "RSS/Feed Logo", since it should be one, the new upload will be displayed, not sure if you'd like to remove, having no logo displayed?

6. There is no setting in Back-end yet, but it could be simple done by adjust the number

6'. Seems that you have not checked "Get Full News Contents" and CronJob is not set up properly.


Full News Content Phase and CronJob to get News automatically are two highlight features, if you do not know how to setup them, please submit a ticket under client area at: www.oxwall.younetco.com/client username, password was already sent to your account.

Also, we have not received any ticket from you so far, we are looking forward to helping you out. We do have separate support system in which we could provide better support service to our valid clients, please feel free to submit ticket or simply send email to support@younetco.com.


Regards,

YouNet 

Ebony Wood
Ebony Wood Aug 31 '13
Younet thanks for your reply.

1 - Widget on home page: Are you going to add it to the plugin as a newer version? Or are are you saying that we should pay you some more money for you to do it as a custom request?

2/3 - Get full news including photo. I looked in your installation instructions, there is nothing telling us how to set the news phase cron job. Unless it is set by itself at installation. Never the less. The plugin does NOT get photos from the scraped article website. Please tell us how to set up the news phase cron job. In case it was not et up.

4 - We will look forward to the URL crumb bread modifications. How soon will you release the modified version?

5 - Rss feed logo: Give users an option to be able to remove or delete the logo. Cos once they upload the logo, If ever they want to remove it, they cant remove it. They only replace it with another logo.

6 - setting in back end: how soon before you release a newer version with this setting added?

7 - Set cron job correctly: How am I going to check if the cron is set properly? where should I begin to perform this check? and what will I be looking for? 

Please YOUNET instead of telling us what we might have done or not done, Just tell us what we should do. I mean provide user instructions.
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