IE8 Bugs

[Jonathan Goldford]

Hi,

Sorry to keep bugging you guys with support requests. We’ve noticed two issues in IE8 and were wondering if you could help us get them resolved.

1.) When viewing the calendar you can choose a new month from the “Events In” dropdown, but the month in the calendar doesn’t actually change.
2.) When loading a new month via AJAX the background for the loading icon appears, but the spinner doesn’t actually show up, only the background color does.

Thanks for the help.

Jonathan

[Jonathan Goldford]

I just realized this somehow ended up in the Pre-Sales Questions forum and not the Events Calendar Pro forum. Is it possible to move it?

Thanks.

[Rob]

Ah shoot, this one slipped through the cracks as well. I apologize we’ve dropped the ball a few times already for you here wiredimpact. Know that when it comes time for a renewal (or if you just want another plugin that you don’t currently have) you’re more than welcome to take it on us as a good faith gesture. We’re sorry to keep you hanging.

For the first issue: does this still occur in Twenty Twelve, or is it specific to your theme? As for the second, the AJAX actually doesn’t run in IE8. So the spinner’s background shouldn’t be showing up and I’m not sure why it is (though I’m unable to recreate locally).

I see the site URL you provided here is a local environment; any chance you’ve got a live link where we could check this out in action?

[Jonathan Goldford]

This reply is private.

[Rob]

Gotcha! Thanks, WiredImpact. It’s looking like the first issue – when viewed in action on your site there – might be the same as the second: an AJAX issue in IE8. Since AJAX doesn’t actually run in IE8, users on that browser are going to find themselves sadly unable to access from the datepicker/event bar unless the live AJAX filtering is disabled for your site (which will bring back a “Submit” button they can hit and which will work).

Does that answer your question? Let me know if not.

[Jonathan Goldford]

Hi Rob,

This absolutely doesn’t answer the question. So, is what you’re saying that people using IE8 will have a dropdown that just doesn’t work? There is no solution here or anything? No fallback for IE8 users?

As far as the background image goes, if AJAX isn’t used then shouldn’t it be coded not to show the loader/spinner at all?

It doesn’t seem like the best solution to these bugs is to turn off AJAX. Wouldn’t you agree that having a fallback clearly makes the most sense?

As a side note Rob, and since you’ve been easily the most responsive person here, this has been an absolutely horrible experience with your plugin. We used it a couple of years ago for a client and loved it. This time around has been awful. The plugin is very buggy, the documentation for customization seems to be almost nonexistent, the support takes absolutely forever or doesn’t seem to come at all (see https://tri.be/support/forums/topic/title-tags-2/), and when we do get support it’s not very helpful (see https://tri.be/support/forums/topic/repeating-event-shows-daily/ or https://tri.be/support/forums/topic/events-page-always-marked-as-current/). Unless something drastic changes I can’t see us ever using your plugins again. We even had a discussion among our team the other day about starting the calendar over with a different plugin. Unfortunately, we’re too far along in the process.

I guess all I would ask is if there is something I’m missing here.

Jonathan

[Rob]

Hello Jonathan. Thanks for the follow-up; sorry to hear the answer wasn’t to your liking. It appears I misunderstood the source of the problem here and after reviewing with the team just now was able to make better sense of it.

It appears the source of the issue here is that you’ve disabled the Event Search Bar – and with that bar disabled, so it relies on the “old” fashion, no submit button appears (and without AJAX loading enabled, there is noting to trigger the date change in IE8). At this time if you’re going to work with the Event Search Bar disabled you will be limiting access for users on older browsers such as IE8. I absolutely agree with you that there should be a workaround for users such as yourself, and we do want to do what we can to support users in this situation and are looking now at either A ) adding a Submit button or B ) forcing the datepicker to be live. It unfortunately isn’t something we can provide a snippet to workaround for, but know that – thanks to you bringing it to our attention – this is now on the radar and being worked into our monthly maintenance release cycle. This will address the loading spinner problem too, which looks to be a byproduct of the way we coded it.

Just so you’re aware of how our development process works, as it may possibly clear up some confusion: whenever a major product overhaul is released, there are unfortunately bound to be bugs that weren’t caught in the QA process. While I wish we could say that every time we start a new lifecycle for the plugin, we were confident we were releasing a 100% bug-free plugin…that’s sadly unreasonable to expect and hasn’t been the case at any of the plugin shops I’ve been involved with. I can say with confidence that we spent literally hundreds of hours QAing this release before we pushed it out, and ultimately got it to the point where we felt – and still do feel – it was stable enough for release. While there were use cases we might have missed in our testing, and early adopters such as yourself would likely be among the first to catch + report those, we are patching them as they come in as part of our monthly release cycle. This should be apparent based on the builds we’ve released over the past month focused exclusively on bug fixes. While we hope early adopters will understand this and tried to convey the gravity of this update, it appears we failed you there. And I – along with the whole team – am sorry for that.

The delayed response time on support threads is also a definite failing on our end. We didn’t adequately prepare for the support load that came with the new release, and on top of that one of our team members quit unexpectedly right after we launched. But you should know we’ve been working hard to get some new folks on the team to help ease the load and the first of them starts tomorrow, which should have a noticeable impact immediately.

While we’re actively working to both stabilize the codebase and make our documentation more understandable to end users, and have already taken clear steps to do so, I would totally understand if you didn’t want to continue using the plugin for future projects. I hope we can – through continued bug fixes and new documentation – earn back your trust. I welcome your feedback on how we could do that (beyond the obvious issues outlined here), and particularly whether there’s any documentation you would find particularly helpful, so that I can get the ball rolling there. If not, know that the offer for a full refund to take your business someplace that better meets your needs is (and will remain) on the table.

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

[Author]

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