I was looking for fast solution to add some pop to a site I'm developing and I came across the subject product. The marketing looked very slick and I thought if it's half as good as they made it look it would definitely be worth the price. I was also attracted to the promise of the productivity boost of inserting sliders and galleries without a lot of learning and programming. Well the old adage; "If it looks too good to be true, it probably is" definitely applies. From install forward, every single thing I've tried to use these products for have been problematic.
- The user guide is useless. It basically just enumerates the fields in the Xpose inspector but doesn't really describe the things you need to know to use the product. They don't describe their container model or what can be manipulated and what cannot be manipulated. They don't describe the # defines in the CSS their code generates, which in my case led to collisions and wacky behavior. They leave it to the user to experiment with their interface and/or to study the code their product generates to figure out how things work and to debug problems.
- Their code is buggy to put it mildly.
- I spent hours and hours figuring out and fixing inconsistencies in the code and images their product generates.
- It doesn't always size images correctly leading to either undesired display results or excessive load time for things like thumbnails. These things I ended up correcting myself with photoshop to get them to work properly.
- The albums can become corrupted, leading to weird image display behaviors. The only way I found to recover was to delete the album and start over.
- The gallery wizard pre populates the gallery with multiple albums assuming that's what you want, leaving you to delete albums and images you don't want!
- In one of my galleries I only wanted a single album. When I closed the gallery wizard it logged an error and then failed to generate on of the divs their inspector uses to enable the gallery controls in their inspector. The effect of this was I had no way to suppress the album selection view. I had to manually add the div to get it to work.
- The pre population theme continues whenever you add images to your albums as they populate every image you add with default titles and text and the only way to keep the gallery from displaying those is to manually edit every single image to remove the unwanted text! The controls in the inspector to disable title and subtitles don't work!
- On one of my albums I missed deleting one of the image titles. The effect of that was instead of just displaying the title for that one image, the gallery displayed that same title for every image in the gallery!
- Their support is not good. I will leave it at that!
- One positive support action is they told me that deleting div id="finishes_caption_in">Image caption and div id="finishes_subcaption_in">Image subcaption will kill the display of the default image titles and descriptions.
In summary, I know enough about all the quirks now to use this stuff, but I wouldn't wish that learning experience on anybody else. On the plus side when you do get it to work it does look snazzy.
Now, I wonder; What tools do others use for slider and gallery generation? I really don't care about the price as long as they are quality tools, they have good user manuals, and they actually save me time.
Sorry for the long winded post.
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