Advanced Settings 3

Short answer:
No, due to the way the plugin is designed, it would still be just as fast even with thousands of features. Don’t worry, we don’t add thousands of features.

Detailed answer:
Advanced Settings 3 works as follows: Only when you open the plugin’s settings window does the plugin recognise which settings are actually available. When saving, only the activated settings are written to a separate cache file. Only this cache file is then taken into account during operation. This means that slowdowns can only occur due to active features. However, as some features deactivate WordPress functions, the plugin can actually make WordPress even faster than in the standard configuration.

Short answer:
Typically, graphical user interfaces represent the largest chunk of data. Since we have largely standardized the user interface for all features, additional features are of little importance.

Detailed answer:
The plugin is currently only 0.5 MB in size. Only about a third of that is used for the actual functionality of the features. The rest is used for the graphical user interface, backward compatibility, performance optimization, and the like. So if we doubled the number of features, the plugin would still be smaller than 0.7 MB. Theoretically, we could quadruple the number of features and still stay under 1 MB. So the number of features isn’t crucial. The trick is to standardize everything around the features so that each additional feature has minimal impact.

We are passionate about lightweight plugins that remain politely in the background while you work, so we can assure you that this will continue to be the case.

Short answer:
The experienced plugin developer is additionally supported by the Patchstack community to ensure the security of the plugin.

Detailed answer:
The plugin is currently maintained by senior web developer Helmut Wandl, who has over 25 years of experience in web development. He is therefore familiar with various common security concepts for many years.

In addition, the plugin is monitored by the Patchstack community, and if security vulnerabilities are discovered, they are reported and fixed by the plugin developer immediately or as soon as possible, depending on the urgency.

You can report security bugs through the Patchstack Vulnerability Disclosure Program. The Patchstack team helps validate, triage and handle any security vulnerabilities. Report a security vulnerability.

Short answer:
The bad ratings arose because a plugin update at the time no longer supported a very outdated PHP version, which unfortunately a few users were still using. However, due to a new WordPress feature, this cannot happen again.

Detailed answer:
The plugin developer at the time had decided in 2017 to use PHP features that were introduced with PHP 5.4. Support for the previous version, PHP 5.3, had already been officially discontinued by The PHP Group 3 years earlier. It was therefore natural to assume that all websites actually in use had already been converted to PHP 5.4 or newer. Unfortunately, this was not the case for a few users.

Nowadays, WordPress allowes to specify in the plugin metadata which PHP version is required as a minimum for the plugin, so that users can only update the plugin if they are using the correct PHP version. While this WordPress feature came too late to prevent the problems and the negative reviews, this problem can fortunately be prevented in the future.

It would be great if you could contribute with your own review to ensure that the ratings reflect the quality of the plugin.