Views 1.3 – a Week Later

   Amir

Announcements

August 30, 2013
16

This week, we released Views 1.3, which is a major redesign of the entire GUI and workflow. I’d like to thank everyone for helping during our beta run and being patient with us in this release week.

Even though we ran a huge amount of testing, some bugs still slipped through. Most this week we spent on understanding these bugs and handling them. I’m happy to say that all critical issues that were reported are now resolved with Views 1.3.0.3 (3 bugfix releases).

There are still a number of usability issues that we’re going to handle, mainly around the listing pages. Views 1.3 limits the number of Views on a listing page and arranges them by name. It looks neat in our screenshots, but we can see that it’s bothering everyone. Us included.

Next week, we’ll change this, allowing for un-paginated display, as well as sorting by update time.

We want to first make sure that all of you are happy and enjoy using Views (all Toolset plugins). Then, we’re back to more features and other cool stuff.

Want to help? Today, you can.

If you are stuck because of new bugs or usability issues, please let me know. Tell me about them in the comments and we’ll push these up in our priority. We have limited resources and we can’t do everything immediately at once, but we promise to handle your problems before we start on anything else.

BTW, we’re almost done with a bugfix release for CRED too. This will handle several WordPress 3.6 issue, as well as other glitches that bother us all. It’s scheduled for Monday.

Have a great weekend 🙂

 

Comments 16 Responses

  1. Hi Amir,

    What is really frustrating is to post a support request and then have your developers respond in a way that indicates that they did not read nor comprehend the post.

    I was pleased to see the fix for the display of all my content templates in the 1.3.0.2 views fix. But it did not address the sizing issues. I took the time yesterday to review the admin sizing issues for the content templates and views, and offered a fix. So what is the resonse I get from Luoy??? “Thanks for the feedback, I have put it into our to-do list as a feature request, our developers will take care of it.” A feature request???? I don’t think so. Here is the fix once again, and it is so simple. You don’t even have to change the vertical align property…I just did that for myself because I think it is more readable…But the sizing issue is SO SIMPLE. You put in a fixed sizing of 960px, and it should have been 100%. PERIOD…NO BIGGY…BUT TO CALL IT A “FEATURE REQUEST”????

    I made some changes to the “views-redesign.css” file to address these issues and improve readability;

    /* Views edit page globals */
    .wpv-views-listing-page,
    .wpv-setting-container {
    CHANGE-max-width: 960px; TO-max-width: 100%;
    }

    .wpv-views-listing-page .wpv-views-listing td {
    vertical-align: top;
    }

    I also complained about the fact that in the previous types and views versions that I was able to customize my admin layouts for views and content templates with the Codepress Admin Columns” plugin…and that for some reason, it no longer interacts with the Views and Templates Admin pages. Again, this is not a feature request…it is about the fact that you guys did something that now interferes with this plugin. And the funny thing is that I can still set up the admin pages on the plugin and preview them, but they do not show up when the views and templates admin functions are accessed.

    So it’s frustrating.

    One more thing. I asked about a solution for conditional redirects on the cred forms two weeks ago and Bigul told me that you guys were looking into this…but when I followed up I got the same canned response that Luoy gave me “Our developer is still looking for a possible solution. Most probably it will be a feature request and we are considering this in future.”

    What this translates to is Nothing is being done. We can’t be bothered.

    The thing is, not everyone wants to interface monetization with woo commerce or use paypal for checkout. I use gravity forms…and I would like to include simple subscription services on my cred forms, that redirect to the appropriate checkout form if selected. Very simple. In addition, I had this set up before cred came along…and the way things work now…I have to send people to a whole new menu, and this means I lose a lot of sales opportunities.

    Making money is just as important for us as it is for you…and this is not a big deal. Can you please provide this feature?? I don’t need some elusive conversation like this from Bigul: “For the time being only possible solution is hijacking the code with APIs. But not sure how it will work. May cred_success_redirect will help you. Not sure. Please check following tutorial.
    https://toolset.com/documentation/user-guides/cred-api/ (At the bottom of the page).”

    I just need to be able to select my redirects conditionally.

    Regards,
    Will

    • Thank you for taking the time to explain all this. Luo is working very hard this week, dealing with all sorts of issues. Some are new bugs, some usability problems and some are new features.

      Luo cannot make changes in the plugins, so he correctly reports suggestions to Views developers and summarizes them in our tracking system. We are not ignoring these. You surely know that even if a patch makes perfect sense, we still need to carefully review it. Imagine how unstable the plugins would be if every logical suggestion would get added immediately and updated for all.

      I knew that this week was very busy in our support and also for our developers. As the project manager, I am getting a lot of feedback from both the support and development team. It was important to me to hear the feedback directly from you, so I wrote this post.

      I very much appreciate you taking the time (again) to repeat it here. I know that it’s Friday for you too and you must have more fun activities than reiterating this.

      We’re not ignoring it. Like I wrote, we are first handling bugs and problems and then getting back to any new features. It was important for me to learn what’s bugging you directly, without getting it filtered by our staff.

      As for CRED Commerce, your point makes sense too. Again, we want to clear all bugs before we continue on new features. I’m sure that you’d like us to do that too.

      Still friends?

    • I agree with the table max-width being changed to 100%. That was one of the first things I *manually* changed temporarily.

  2. One more thing I fixed was the word-break for the content template title column. I changed the word-break to “normal” so that each word in the title would display complete, as before this the words in the title were being broken apart in weird ways.

    .wpv-views-listing-page td:first-child {
    word-break: normal;
    }

  3. It would be great if you brought back the Save button at the when you edit a View. Especially when you are first cofiguring a view, you want to quickly set all settings and then save them all.

    With the new Views 1.3 you have to press the update/save button 6+ times on different parts of the View config. Please fix this!

  4. Currently running v1.3.0.3 and experiencing these issues:

    1. I cannot *permanently* dismiss the “Done setting up this View?” help box at the bottom of every View, it keeps coming back whenever I open the View editor page again.

    2. When building a slider View and selecting pagination with automatic transition, the button “Advanced options” appears twice and causes some weirdness when clciking. Screenshot (http://i.imgur.com/SYOfDfN.png)

    3. Translating the “Any” value of select fields in parametric search controls is buggy. I’ve reported this in the WPML forum (http://wpml.org/forums/topic/jerkiness-in-translating-views-parametric-search-controls/)

    4. If a View is querying taxonomy terms, there is a persistent filter selected “Taxonomy is One of these ()” which I did not select in the first place. If I remove this filter, go to another page and come back to this View again, I still see it there. Screenshot (http://i.imgur.com/LuuUPDj.png)

    5. I have a View with pagination controls. I’ve chosen to insert these controls manually in the layout section, not the filter section because of design decision. Views keeps nagging me with a message about “This View uses pagination but pagination controls have not been inserted in the filter HTML”. I click the “No – I will add pagination controls manually” button, but the message keeps popping up again when I open the View. This gives me the impression that I’ve done something wrong and I NEED to insert these controls in the filter section not the layout section, but it works in both cases, so…

    6. Finally, I hope you did not forget about my other rambling novel here: https://toolset.com/2013/08/major-types-and-views-beta-and-cred-update/comment-page-1/#comment-43905 🙂

  5. Honestly, what bugged me most about this release is the number of Big Bugs in it. These are not small nags and the change logs in new releases simply describing them as “Small bugfix release.” does make my blood boil. A more descriptive change log is needed telling us what has been fixed.

    I also think one week of open BETA is not enough at all. I said it before and I will say it again, I would be very happy to be a BETA tester but not for one week. No one contacted me for any other BETA testing, so when an open BETA was out, and given the history, I know the period is short, then I did not bother with it. It is just too short a time and we are all very busy.

    I reported no less than 7 bugs in 48 hours since the release, three of which were major. I just discovered another very serious bug which I am trying to replicate before reporting. Basically an entire Content Template vanished when I updated and saved. It’s not even in my database – the content just deleted itself. Thankfully I have a backup because I would really be mad now. These are not things which should ever happen in a public release – these are things which I might expect to see in a BETA 1 version or less.

    Do not get me wrong – I love toolset, and have no qualms with the support I received before this nor after – the guys are always great, efficient and fast. And I will still be your happy client going forward once all this is resolved, but in my opinion this release, so far is proving to be disastrous and endangers the reputation you guys are so trying to build.

    Please take this as constructive criticism. I think toolset is the best thing to happen on wordpress – period, but releases like this one could very easily burn you for good. Just my humble opinion.

    • Thanks a lot Marcel. I really appreciate your time and all the help you’re giving us with accurate feedback and good suggestions.

      I’ve never seen anything get lost from the database. It’s difficult to tell how this had happened to you and I would be surprised if you can repeatedly replicate it. Obviously, saving Content Templates is something that we test. That page uses the WordPress post-edit, which even has auto-save, so I’m not sure how this had happened to you. If you can replicate it, let us know and we’ll be all over it.

      • In my case, when the Content Templates are ‘Update’d, the post is updated but they are being pushed into the Posts post type with all the Views shortcodes displaying in the WYSIWYG Visual Editor.

        However, this was being caused it seems because of a conflict with http://wordpress.org/plugins/post-type-switcher/. Once I’d deactivated that, Content Template updates weren’t being moved.

        • That makes sense. We’ll try to see how to get Views and post-type-switcher to work together. However, this is not a new issue. I’m pretty sure that it’s been there from day one, as an incompatibility between the two plugins.

          • It’s not a major issue regards the post-type-switcher as this is a plugin that I tend to activate, use and then deactivate. The issue arises if a plugin has to be always activated.

            Despite the current issues, the new UI is a huge improvement and far less confusing than before. Keep up the great work.

        • OK got my content template thanks to Emerson who had a backup of it from an issue he helped me with yesterday.

    • I am happy to report back over my own comment, that while this release sure had a bumpy start, the toolset team have as usual been extreemly efficient in the handling and fixing of all reported bugs. Special thanks to CaridadZ, Emerson, Ana, Luoy, Srdjan and Amir for their ongoing and super excellent support.