AVO-Ken

Thanks for the suggestion but I have it figure out.

 

The attached template is for 4.11.4 ,possiibly slightly earlier, I do not know when they changed the product template last.

 

This is just a template file not an addon. I puts the buttons above the product options and expands the options field to full screen. Useful if you have long list of options or if your options take up a lot of space.

Figured it out. Just make the payment method Disabled. Admin will be able to use it and customers won't see it.

There are plans to look into adding other image viewers. Currently, it's planned for December, unless something changes.

 

The real issue is that you stripped away applications that people were using without providing a good alternative. V4.9.3, the most recent usable version, of CSC, doesn't even have the very outdated Owlcarousel. We all, were using something else that is now gone and most of us probably feel our previous choice was better. Then you state you are looking at bringing in an alternative in December. I am astonished, that you would not make the change all at once. It just doesn't make sense. It is like saying oops i'm sorry we'll fix it. V4.10.x and 4.11.x thus far have had so many disappointments. You guys really need to get things back on track. We all depend on you to provide a solid foundation for all of our businesses. Not many of us are feeling warm and fuzzy right now.

 

Thanks

Ken

I like many others have not upgraded our live store which is on V4.9.3 but I am trying to keep up to date on my dev sites as there are many new issues since V4.10.X. Well, starting with V4.11.1 CSC has stripped away all options for an image viewer. We are now left with OwlCarousel which is at least based on appearance is horrible.

 

This is from their blog post.

[*] Image galleries: Outdated galleries (FancyBox, MagnificPopup, prettyPhoto, Lightbox) were removed.

 

I am not going to suggest that any of the removed ones were any better the other and we all had probably used different ones for different reasons. Still, I think we should have some kind of choice here. Anyhow, OwlCarousel presents terrible on a PC. No ALT info and the window is enormous. I'd really like to get the Alt info back and the bordering of the image leaves lots to be desired.

 

I have played around with CSS and have not been successful making adjustments to the window.

 

FYI: For those that have not yet upgraded to V4.11.1. It has issues and is not considered stable in my mind (As does V4.10x). Still, I am trying to roll with the punches and so I am ready when the CSC fixes the issues. Maybe that will be with V4.12.X or maybe I will move to another platform. I am getting tired of the recent decisions on the direction of CSC. Anyhow, off my soapbox. Any, input on OWLCarousel is appreaciated.

 

Thanks

Ken

 

 

Please note! that I'm no going to bring all the billing fields back for a regular person for cases like he buys for someone else, or he buys from another country. because:

- billing address when you are paying with card is obsolete for most of world payments.

- it can be easily solved by comments to an order

 

Say what? Are you trying to eliminate the use of CS Cart in USA? We rely heavily on the billing address for fraud protection. All US banks participate in address verification. Many of our customers regardless of B2B or B2C ship to alternate addresses. How can you so easily generalize billing and shipping. We do not accept credit cards from International customers because most do not provide address verification and those customers are forced to an alternate payment like PayPal.

 

 

On another note: I came to this forum today to see why I am not seeing the releases available to us. I was not aware that the issues are as big as they are, well, not in CS Cart's eyes I guess. Am I missiing something! I did not see this change listed in the Blog or Change log! This is a huge change and it should be in giant bold letters in an email blast.

 

As far as the phone number is concerned. Not sure it is an issue but CS cart should automatically fill in that field of the phone number when the customer selects the country and make it editable just in case the customer has a phone number from a different country.

 

Ughh, it amazes me how many potential CSC users are going to upgrade without knowing the true severity of the changes. Hope you guys are getting ready for lots of support requests. Guess we will have to wait for release 4.11

 

Just in case it wasn't absolutely clear we need billing and shipping address fields. It is very easy for the customer to tick a button to ship to an alternate address.

Nah - Too much credit is given.

 

What did we lose when we went from V3 to V4 AND WHY???

 

Product Filters no longer show product count next to them - Gone - WHY (Perhaps to increase speed but why not give us the choice of of using the feature)

 

Dynamic filling of menus - Used to show subcategories of the active category - Gone - WHY

 

Admin Area - Removed "Search All words" from - Say What!!! - Gone - WHY

 

Ability to import Categories with a ":" in their name - Needed for those of us that sell products that are format based like heat shrink, projection screens etc. like 3:1 Heat Shrtink Tubing or 2:35 Projection Screens - Gone - WHY

 

Those are a few examples of things I know about. I am sure the list is much longer.

 

 

Now ask yourselves and your customers that you build shops for:

What are the key search fields you want in admin to search orders and 90% will undoubtedly say "customer name", "email" AND "Order Number". But yet we get "customer name", "email", "Manager" and "Order Total". What is "Manager"? Manager and Order Total should be in the advanced section and Order Number should be staring you in the face.

 

You can't just just give someone or a company a pass because you can get by with something. Some things should be just included.

You really have to go over each feature and grade the level of implementation to give them a final score.

 

- For Instance the Search Engine is a big fat Negative Feature - You either have to buy a great addon like Cart-Power's or use a paid for Searchise which in it inceptioon had issues as well. I no longer use that and have no idea what the status of that is.

 

- Product Reviews - Does anyone use this? It is terrible. Should be a negative but since it is not required like search I would say the score for reviews would be a Zero.

 

- The menus are also way behind the times. Score a  4

 

- Importing is the best way to work in admin. It saves a ton of time and it also needs a lot of work. V4 has some improvements but we are still a long ways away. Score a 5

 

- Document Editor - Hey pretty cool - Score 7 maybe 8

 

- Email Templates - Ughhh - Seems like an afterthought - Why do I have customer and Admin? Many of them will be the same. Give me a check box Cusomter/Admin or Both if necessary. Why can't I have a nice shipping notification with tracking. It should be able to include the nice Packing slip I created with the document Editor - Score 1 Why

 

Sure fixing Product options might a good step but hey this really isn't fixing that much.

 

The biggest most useful improvement I have seen over the years has been import of product options and reponsive themes.

 

 

CSC is taking the wrong approach in splitting the company and resources. The focus of the company should be to improve the product so that it is a player in the website shopping cart solutions not on developing/selling fixes for the product. There are plenty of good resources already to fix the problems. As an end-user/slash moderate code hacker myself, I will always choose to use a third party to develop fixes. Why pay the same company to fix issues they created or did not implement completely. Seems wrong to me.

 

Yet I am still a dedicated user, not because It is the best solution but because I already have too much time and money invested already.

 

Hopefully we do not have to jump through hoops again going from V4 to V5 like we did for V3 to V4.

There a lots of tiny little things that need to get fixed that will greatly improve CSC. I have been working on migration from V3 to V4 for months now. A lot of the delay has been due to incompatibilities of addons we had developed that really should be core items. Some of the items are depricated features. When I started using CSC 6 years ago I had high hopes that CSC would become the cart I wanted but it is still falling short for seemingly little things like:

 

product unit price

product availability statements

ability to tick a check box to select subcategories for product filters

restrict products from specific shipping methods

import of category seo names

import of orders

import of all product fields

import of all category fields

import of pages

dynamic filling of subcategory menu - depricated

admin product search - all words, any words etc.

make customer product reviews usable like you see on amazon

make products easy to add to reviews

and many many more......

 

I would rather pay a little more for a cart than constantly pay to have repeatedly to have addons fixed because CSC changed

Posting this info because it took a lot of effort to get the cron jobs to work. I take lots of info off the forums so this is one of my contributions. I've tried addons and simple cron scripts work best for me.

Attached are instructions for cron job commands for both V3 and V4. there are some slight variations between the two.

They include: clear cache, clear thumbnails, clear template cache (V4 Only), delete statistics, clean logs, optimize database

Note: Clean Logs and Clear Statistics do not leave a subset of data.



Website backup and Database Backup

I do not have a cron command for these but there are other ways to do it with backup software.
My goal was create and store backups of the database amd website on my PC. There is affordable software for this although not easy to find on the web. I did find and tried the following software that does both tasks.

SiteVault = The one I am currently using on my WIN 8.1 pc. Setting it up was not simple and intuitive but once set-up it seems to work flawlessly. I did not use their support to figure it out.

Iperiusbackup = Never got to test this one but it is candidate. Little more expensive than the others.

backupsf = had problems using WIN 8.1 and could not get this one to work at all. No response from their support.

webdrive = works better in WIN 8.1 than backupsf but had many many errors and gave up on it. Their support staff tried to help but I ended up giving up on them simply because it should be that hard to get working. I gave them 2 weeks of my time.


Hope it makes someone's life easier.

Ken