Bugs

Hi [email protected],

There is no need to uninstall/install everything. You can read this article of how to update a theme or watch this video.
Please after the update you need to clear your browser's cache, so that there are no old javascript files left.

Thanks

Well, the good news is that after following these instructions (I didnt remove the old themes first before installing the new ones) the menu issue I reported seems to be resolved.  The bad news is that the IE8 issues are still there.  You can see them on your own demo site for the theme so its definitely something on your end:

http://screencast.com/t/TksIoKEFP2


Also, I noticed today that the theme is not respecting certain Payment Methods (Admin -> Configuration -> Payment -> Payment Methods).  I enabled a few of the payment methods on my demo site (of particular importance to me is PurchaseOrder) & the Smart theme never opened the dialog allowing me to choose from the available payment methods on checkout.  Instead it went directly to the credit card form.  If I deactivate a credit card option and only have PurchaseOrders enabled it does not allow checkout at all.

Hi [email protected],

Please see my comments below for the two questions you had:

1. As you know IE 8 does not have support media queries and thus no mobile device use IE 8 as its own browser. So in the real live there is no way to have IE 8 opened on a device different than a computer. So resizing the browser as shown on your video does not make much sense unless you open the theme from a very old computer with a very small resolution.

2. If I understand correctly you are saying that you miss the Payment Method step in the checkout process in the Nop Smart Theme. The payment method is part of the nopCommerce checkout progress that we do not modify, but just style. Can you please make sure that you have configured your payment methods correct. Also make sure that the product you are testing with has price greater than 0 so that there is amount to pay and payment method to choose. You can test on our demo and see whether you can reproduce the issue.

Hope that helps!

I couldn't disagree more.  Despite Microsoft's best efforts, almost 50% of all businesses still use XP and (last I checked) 20-25% of all browser activity is still IE8.  I think its very poor judgement to say that that large of a percentage of the market share needs to use our websites in "a certain way" or the website will not work properly.  Again, maybe I'm missing something, but this seems a fixable issue so I'm not sure why you wouldn't want your templates to work properly regardless of the client.  If its your official stance that you don't intend to support IE8 that's one thing, but to say that known bugs are acceptable for a browser you do support seems misguided.

If you don't think its worthwhile to fix the issue on your side, could you give some suggestions as to how you would resolve the issue via CSS mods (non-source changes) without breaking the other browser / device responsive features?  Also, just so I know, do you intend to look into the other IE8 issues in the video (The product list view for example which had nothing to do with client width?)



Your demo is currently working as expected so this must be issue on my end.  We price our products dynamically via a web service so its certainly possible that the underlying price is 0 even though that's not the price of the actual product.  Ill look there.

Thanks!

Hi [email protected],

I am surprised with your statistic that 25% of the browser activity is IE 8 - http://theie8countdown.com/, but this is not the goal of our discussion.

What I tried to explain in my previous post is that the theme works on IE 8 - you can open the demo and browse freely the theme. My main goal was to explain that no mobile devices use IE 8 and that is why resizing the browser as seen on your demo does not make sense. I doubt that any customer will open a site and normally will start resizing the browser. If you browse normally the theme in IE 8 without resizing the browser, the theme works fine.

But we are going to fix these issues so that even when resizing the browser in IE 8 the layout will not change even though that this is not a real live scenario.

Thanks for your feedback!

Best Regards!

That's great news and truly appreciated.  In response to your other comments, this is going off-topic now so Ill try to keep it short.  

1. Its a huge mistake for developers to assume the "right" way users should be using their software, or that how they use their software should be whats considered "normal."  I have no idea how others will use my software, but it has to work right regardless.

2. Your stats are skewed because they focus on browsing, not e-commerce which is what we really care about.  Its changing, but most e-commerce still occurs on the desktop which IE8 still dominates:

http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0

Anyway, off-topic rants aside, thanks again for the great support.  Its much appreciated!

Bob

Hi Bob and Boyko, et al,

I follow this post because I did have some issues with initial release that have since been resolved (thanks guys!) and I couldn't help but witness the last few posts and Bob's closing argument.

I actually watched your video captures and checked my Google analytics data to see if this is ever a scenario for my customers, because it would be in everyone's best interests to fix it if it were.

My findings, especially from your video examples, were on the same page at the Support team in that, if anyone still uses IE8 and decides they need to narrow the browser that far on their laptop or desktop, they should already have seen that it looks better when it's slightly wider and know (from their experience with IE8) that it may very well be an issue with IE8. The customer basically isn't going to nit-pick the layout as much as we do as site owners.

As far as your percentages on how many "desktop" users still rely on IE8, that's (thankfully) no where close to any data I've pulled from actual, real-world google analytics in a live and thriving website, over the course of 3+ years. The actual count of IE8 users was more like 2 in 1000 total visitor, or 2 in 100 desktop browser users (2%) the highest being Chrome, Safari, Firefox & IE10+.

Getting to your comment that desktops still dominate ecommerce - that's actually not the case anymore, as my data has consistently shown a spike in the number of visits by and purchases from mobile devices has eclipsed desktop visits and sales and has been trending that way for nearly 2 years now. Especially now that I'm using a fully responsive website.

Taking in consideration the time these developers have put into designing compatible solutions based on real-world, current trends - I'd say they're focusing their energy in the correct direction and may be spinning off course by going back to add support for a browser segment that does not pay most website owner's bills.

I hope I didn't offend you, I just needed to throw my findings into the discussion because I too wondered if this was going to be an issue for my customers. And it hasn't been. =)

Not offended at all.  I welcome the conversation.  I also don't want to come off as the "PRO IE8" guy.  Totally not my stance or point.  That all being said, its my opinion as a developer that we either have to support an environment or not.  That's why I asked that question in the original post.  If we portend to support IE8 then we cant say "... as long as you use it like I want you to."  My nop site isnt live yet and I have bigger fish to fry at the moment, but I don't feel its even usable via IE8.  Worse yet is that its not *my* site, but my customers.  Im trying to get in front of having to explain to them (non-developers) why the website that they are paying top dollar for doesn't work from their office computer.

Regarding nop-templates limited resources, if this is something that will take weeks to resolve than I agree with your sentiment, but if they can spend a few days on it and its fixed forever that seems a worthwhile endeavor.  After all, these aren't my numbers based on limited sample size.  Even if they are trending downward, the stats in my link are current and global.

Hey Bob, I appreciate the discussion and the time you took to look up how my site lays out for IE8 customers. I do agree with you that there should be fundamental cross-browser support and since IE8 is still in use, this makes sense. Thanks again!

Looks like there is a small bug with the Smart theme in Chrome.  When resizing the browser window, the search input in the header never properly realigns if you expand the window again.  All other browsers I tested worked as expected.

Here's a video from your live demo:

http://screencast.com/t/BCttIWs702uY