Product Input Fields for WooCommerce

Even though we only use PIF Lite, Tyche Software was very responsive and helpful to my quite technical inquiry about their plugin.

The plugin works very well and is easy to set up. I hope the developer will provide updates.

I was looking for a plugin to add a simple text field so customers can add a greeting text that shall be shipped with the goods.

Good concept, hence the 1 star.

Execution and support: zero stars…

HTML/CSS implementation: bad
– The text field butts up in the same div as the quantity and add to cart div.
– On the checkout page the greeting message is added to the product name/title and messes p the entire shopping experience.
– In the email the same, the text from the text field is added to the product name/title.

I do not recommend this. I barely make bad reviews, but this one deserves it unless the creator wakes up and at least answers the open support requests. Especially considering that he sells a PRO version of this…

Works as intended. Staff is quick to respond and fix any issues you run into. Cannot recommend highly enough.

OK. So, I really wanted to like this plugin and use it. It has some nice features, at least from a back-end perspective. So, I’ll just dive in.

The Good
It supports a wide range of input types, including things like “country” (pulling from a pre-populated list so you don’t have to enter a bazillion options), phone numbers, email addresses, etc. All well and good. And from the ones I tried, it does them all admirably.

The Bad
The backend interface is a bit clunky. For each field, you have a big, collapsable set of controls similar to the woocommerce product settings, excerpt, descriptions, etc. However, if you collapse them, the only label you see is something like “custom field #20”. If all are collapsed and you need to find which question asks the name of their fish or somesuch, you have to open them back up until you find it. Not the end of the world, but one of those things that seems obvious and was overlooked.

There’s also not really any clean way to add a description or text comment under a field label – at least not in any way that can be styled (see The Ugly), and that won’t likely skew the HTML table rendering.

The Ugly
So, here’s why I’m giving it 2 stars. Implementation of the HTML/CSS. Not just Ugly. Very Ugly. Implemented as a table (somewhat understandable since Woocommerce does this, too), but something like flexbox or grids would be far better. But the kicker, and what really clenched it for me, is that although you are allowed to assign CSS classes to each field, the CSS class is ONLY applied to the input control – the text field, radio buttons, etc. If you need to style something about the label, too bad. Now, yes, I could have written javascript to run after the page loads that would traverse back up the DOM tree and then down to find the label’s table cell, etc., but … no. Not for $40. At the VERY least, the CSS should have been applied to the table row that contains both the label and the control. As a developer, this would have at least made some sense.

In the end, I just saw too many things that just didn’t look right, and since I’m working more and more with designers who are picky about design, it became a dealbreaker.

If the developer would like to reach out to me and get some constructive ideas, I’m open to that. Growth is always good. But at this point, I’d recommend looking at other plugins that do the same or similar.