team-member-showcase

This would have been a five star review; it does look really good, but I think it's a matter of style over function. I know it's untested on my version of wordpress, but this was the third free version 'meet the team' plugin I'd tried; I liked the look of it, and I was impressed by the demo. I toyed with the idea of giving the plugin four stars because it looks so nice and does work well. I also considered giving it two stars because of the limitations, but thought that might be churlish as it doesn't claim to be anything it isn't, and the design evidently has a lot of thought put into it. I think three is a reasonable compromise. Firstly, it works exactly as described in WordPress 4.9.2. Which is a good start. You can't select colours, but obviously these can be customised with css, so not complaining. I want to love the way that when you hover/tap on the team member box, the job title comes up and the text starts scrolling - it looks impressive, but it's not ideal. The scrolling excerpt/job description is cute, but not very obvious on older (I don't mean dinosaur, but a few years old) smartphones - on a nokia lumia, for example, you have to tap in just the right place, in order to view the job title and for the text to scroll. And I notice, with touchscreen, if you don't use exactly the right amount of pressure for the right amount of time, your device thinks you're trying to copy the team member name, so you have to tap outside the box to escape the 'copy' funtion and then try again, in order to have the job title revealed, and for the text to scroll. I doubt the average website visitor would know that they need to hover over or tap the box in order to view the job title. While on the subject of copying, if you want to copy the text in the job description to paste elsewhere, you try and grab the text but the automatic scroll function keeps going, so you can't copy the first part, and you can't scroll back to read or copy at your own speed. And the right click/select all function, selects the entire page. I suppose that copying the text is really only something you might try to do as a content editor, but any reader may try to grab the text to scroll up and read it, or stop it to look at it, and this can't be done. When you just look at the job description, without tapping (on a mobile device) or hovering (on a computer) if the text is more than two lines long, it just seems as though the text is cut off at the bottom. There is no indication that you should scroll; or that you might need to tap or hover to read more information; to the average person's eye, it just looks like a design fault. There isn't an awful lot of space for the member name, so long names wrap, which makes the team member box height increase, so the box sizes aren't consistent. Had a go at just putting in forenames, which looks better, but not really appropriate on corporate websites. On the other hand, the job title doesn't wrap, so the end of a long job title is simply cut off by the box! If there is only line of text in the job description, the team member box renders smaller than the others, so again, the box heights aren't consistent. If there is too much text (more than about 50 words) the automatic scroll function goes far too fast to read. I tried a 400 word bio in one, and it scrolled past at a rate of knots! It would be nice if there were a lightbox, on click, or even just a 'more' link of some sort - in our case, we need both a job description and full bio, including experience and qualifications, and the plugin only gives enough space for the (brief) job description. So the only feasible option is to write separate bios and link to them on the page beneath the showcase, which kinda defies the point of having the plugin in the first place. Another small nitpick is that the plugin gives no indication of the recommended photo size/ aspect ratio, and no option to crop, so photos can kinda squished until you figure out what sizes they should be. So basically, if your team members have short names and job titles, you only want to put in a very brief description of their role (I'd say approximately 45 words is optimum) and you don't mind too much about people on older phones maybe peering at it a bit and being a little confused, this is a nice looking, easy to use plugin that will make your Meet The Team page look quite swanky. As far as style goes, and in comparison with other plugins I've tested, the free version is generous, and there is no real incentive or need to pay for the premium/pro version. I have the free version, but it seems that the only benefits the pro version offers are: an extended range of styles; the ability to select item width/height and font size (which anyone with a basic knowledge of CSS could do for themselves anyway) and a target_blank option to open social links in a new tab (a bit tight not include for free, in my opinion)... Rather than increased functionality. So sadly, I think the search continues for the perfect 'meet the team' plugin.

Great plugin which I recommend for an easy use on Wordpress. These guys gave me an excellent support. Great work!