I’ve been looking through the forums here and there are a number of pretty basic feature request here unanswered or unaddressed.
Examples
2 year old feature request to allow you to organize sites into groups - Group sites in folder in sidebar Seems pretty basic to me… (I don’t even care about this feature but I can see how it should have been adressed)
I’ve also had a number of issues with the flywheel product myself.
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When I delete plugins locally and make a push they aren’t deleted in the production environment. This is something that has potential to severely irritate my clients when they log into their site and see 10 un-updated plugins when in reality they are just plugins I deleted that won’t stay deleted. It makes me look like I’m not doing my job. - no timeline for a fix
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Sites randomly get corrupted and have to be restored from a backup. Could be a huge problem if working on a major release or change.
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Super slow loading on production site at one point. Per the support ticket the caching was configured incorrectly and I should reach out of I experience the issue again. I didn’t do anything unique or unusual for that site and that sort of thing erodes my confidence in the “managed hosting” aspect.
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Although I’m a pro user I find it extremely distasteful that this differential pushing is a paid feature. MS Team Foundations doesn’t require this, git doesn’t require this, why is an inferior product charging for this feature?
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Along the same lines - can’t push to staging without being a pro customer. Staging sites were a key component of choosing flywheel, feels a little like entrapment.
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You can’t debug in preferred environments and you can’t push/pull from custom environments. This leaves us with the choice of either being able to debug or being able to take advantage of the flywheel workflow. Quite frankly this workflow is the only reason I’m at flywheel and another a cheaper hosting provider. This choice significantly erodes the value proposition there.
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When I pull a site with the files open in vs code there is a cryptic error message. This should be handled more gracefully such as with a notice to the user that they have site files open and they need to be closed before pull. As of now its a 5 minute wait for the pull to finish and then you are greeted with an error that doesn’t even tell you the problem. I knew this could be a cause through experience working with other in-house tools at corporate jobs.
Why are we building a “local lightining beta” when some of this other stuff that hasn’t been addressed? This request to eliminate virtualization only has 2 votes as a feature request.
Looking through some of the other feature requests it looks like some of them have been pushed out in the lastest version of local but the topics haven’t been closed leaving the forum un-maintained.
Flywheel has amazing world class sales and marketing materials, and the chat support is great, but all of that is starting to be overshadowed by crappy tech and some questionable choices by the development teams leadership in my opinion. I was hoping since yall got acquired that this would lead to some capital injection and moving of the needle but so far not much to get excited about.
I’m curious, how many internal dedicated developers does the flywheel local team have? How many of them are senior resources? The ones that have interacted on the forum seem like they have the talent but it doesn’t seem like there are enough of them to move this product along. Where is this product going? What is the roadmap for development?
I really like the idea of local and local is one of the main reasons I chose flywheel as a hosting provider but I’m starting to have my doubts in the effectiveness when compared to just building out some home grown deployment tools and using a cheaper hosting company.
Looking at some of the forum posts I feel that I’m not the only one who is having concerns. I know I’m just a small fry on the 10 site plan but I take a lot of pride in the quality of my work and my business is starting to get some traction. I want to make sure that flywheel is the best long term choice for a scaling company.
Please pass these concerns on to the decision makers at flywheel.