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My Rant about DealerInspire.

Rick Buffkin

Sausage King of Chicago
Oct 29, 2009
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This is me.
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This is me after moving to a DI website!
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Ok... Where do I start? How about with creating pages. It's wordpress right? How hard can it be? Well, lets see here. There's no shortcodes provided for the basic information. A simple shortcode for like Service hours and phone number. Sales hours and phone number or for Parts. Sure theres a template that has all of them but if your building out specific dept. pages, why put other depts info on there?

The page is built for a specific dept. I've pretty much come to the point now that I don't even use the wysiwyg editor now. I've moved to outside tools to build the content in the pages. Then when I need a shortcode to populate a section, I plan ahead for a 35 - 45min call into tech support for them to chase down the answer because they don't know it. How about staff pic's for those dept's? Where the shortcode for that? It's nowhere to be freaking found in the dashboard. Nowhere!!!

- How about showing a button on mobile and hiding it on desktop?? Simple right?!?! Not really! There's a CSS class name you have to know in order to do this and you have to edit the HTML and name the class name for that link with that specific CSS classname. I found this on the Service Appt page if any of you are wondering. To hide the Appt scheduler on mobile use this classname for the div container (<div class="hidden-xs">) that has the iframe for your scheduler. To show the button on mobile use this classname in the div container for the link (<div class="visible-xs">)

- Inventory. I could write a freaking novel about this. I'll give you one example. I set up a call with VAuto and DI to setup the pricing API. I was on the phone with both companies for just over an hour explaining the pricing, where to display it, etc, etc... I had to go into a meeting so I jumped off the call. Before I left the call, I confirmed with everyone that everybody understood what was needed and where. "Yes Rick, we understand and we'll have it setup for you shortly." I thought, great! I can mark that off my to do list. Three weeks later, I get a call that a vehicle needed a immediate price change. I go to VAuto, make the change and wait 10 - 15 mins and still no update on the website. I'm thinking, something is broke. Call DI support and they say it's set up. Well, after a few hours of testing I finally figured out what the issue was. DI mapped the pricing API to a price field in their tool that wasn't displayed anywhere on the live website. Basically a hidden field. Seriously... It got priced to a field that wasn't being used. FYI - the pricing API still isn't setup last time I checked.

I could keep going with issues and problems that I've had and continue to run into. I'll keep it short for now. A simple word of advice to anyone reading this. When you do your demo, be sure you do a very thorough demo, especially if your a hands-on internet manager and build your own pages. Don't let them show you a couple of items to wow you. Have them to build a page in front of you that you yourself would build and see if that person knows how to use their own product and tools. Ask them about the short codes and where to find them (Hint - they're not in the dashboard anywhere). To show a button on mobile and not desktop, ask them to show you (Hint - you have to use the code I posted above). If the person showing you the demo doesn't know Bootstrap (how to split a full page into separate columns and containers) and CSS, they're seriously going to embarrass themselves. If you don't know Bootstrap and CSS, you're going to struggle as well.

Just my .02 cent

Now, let me get back to building some more content with my 3rd party applications for my DI website.
 
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Reactions: John V.
Welcome to Wordpress - the land of workarounds and plugins.
Wordpress is great at many things, but it has always had an overly simplified page builder.
Almost every other CMS in the market has drag/drop, hours blocks, etc.

I've always used Wordpress for small business sites, landing pages, etc.
I've also always advocated against using it for large dealer sites, because building a bunch of plugins on top of an open source CMS isn't how you get to the "best" product possible.
 
Hello Rick, I appreciate the feedback about the page editor. We used Wordpress as the base of our CMS because of it’s widespread use and immediate familiarity with many of our dealer partners. The editor supports both visual mode and text or HTML mode for those like yourself who want to take content creation a step further.

We also load the Bootstrap 3 framework to provide helper classes and layout abilities to support more advanced page creation. This is where the hidden-xs and visible-xs classes come from. Here is a link to that documentation: https://getbootstrap.com/docs/3.3/css/#responsive-utilities

However, between the simple Wordpress visual editor and full on HTML markup, there is an opportunity for us to improve. We have a page composer tool, but this doesn't solve all the needs we have heard from our partners. So we are working on an entirely new visual editor that is intuitive and easy to use and will open up a large amount of new functionality when creating pages. Feedback like yours definitely drives us to create better solutions. We will keep you updated on progress there.

And thanks for jumping on the call with Bruce Etzcorn. He has sent you a list of shortcodes you can use to your advantage. Those should have been readily accessible and we will remedy that.

Again, thank you and please let us know if there is anything else we can help with!
 
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Our websites are very custom and done with WordPress. We've built our own page builder for customers in the past, but we're now using the new WordPress Gutenberg editor for clients now. It allows us to create custom, reusable blocks, hide blocks that suck or are unnecessary, and is pretty intuitive and easy to use. It has been a game changer.
 
@Alexander Lau We haven't added Gutenberg yet to DI installs. We have been evaluating the updates made and it's use case for dealers. While it may be a great new tool for robust posts and simple page layouts, we still don't feel it fully meets the needs of dealers and therefore are in the process of building out our own editor. There are a couple of page creation third party plugins we have vetted and installed in the past as well at a dealer's request.
 
Gutenberg is :thumbdn: for DealerRefresh.

The DealerRefresh blog is on Wordpress and adding new pages is not nearly as nice as it once was. It is inspiring a NEEDED change to get off of Wordpress and move to something much more integrated with these forums. @craigh has been a giant help here, and we hope to have some cool new DR in the near future.

Migrating 15 years of content is :crazy:

P.S. nothing against Wordpress. If we were just a blog we'd be all about it.
 
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@Rick Buffkin Ah, the slippery slope of offering a customizable solution...

I'm not questioning your abilities within their system but want to point out the irony here to me is your actually having the ability to customize your site allows for the existence of your frustration. My rant would be the opposite issue with my sites on the DDC platform (Ford and Lincoln made me do it :mad:). I can't do poop (G-Rated is how I roll) on those sites. We do run our main market and group sites internally on WP so I believe in the platform.

The Refresh:rocks:ing part is how Dealer Inspire jumped into this forum to directly address the issue. When is the last time you saw a top-tier vendor jump in here to help? I mean look at @Dan Schroeder. Have you even seen a better looking, more helpful, knowledgable human being in your entire life? And he's like a SVP or something...