Advanced Users Guide

[saucysal]

I think that when Sellerdeck put code in the AUG, they should test if first, and if it works and is a useful feature, Sellerdeck should support it; if a customer is paying for support, then Sellerdeck should help with problems that may have resulted from using that code, and certainly with problems that are unconnected to the code but a customer happens to have used it.

Taking it further still, if the code is good and the feature is useful, then perhaps it should be included in the program as a standard option.

There must be a lot of Sellerdeck customers "reinventing the wheel"; that is, following instructions from the AUG to do something fairly basic, when it could be done once by Sellerdeck in an upgrade.

Examples that immediately come to mind, but there are many others, are capitalisation of address entries in the Checkout, and adding images to radio button choices.

Sarah

[brucet]

Hi Sarah

Thanks for your comment.

Over the years quite a few functions from the Advanced User Guide have been incorporated into the software, sometimes in a different form. In general, though, the purpose of the Advanced User Guide is precisely to make more widely available the many workarounds for specific scenarios which users have developed over the years, but which we have not had time to fully validate or integrate into the software.

We give all the workarounds a basic test at the time of inclusion, but we are not able to give them the same degree of testing as a standard feature. To take a random example, if a particular workaround did not work for logged in customers using WorldPay on a site with split SSL, we might not pick that up.

The workarounds are also not built to our own coding standards, which can make them hard for us to support.

In addition, many have limitations which make them unsuitable as standard features, which would require considerable effort on our part to remove.

The capitalisation script is a case in point. It is understandably popular. However in some cases it will incorrectly recapitalise names that were entered correctly in the first place, which might cause offense - eg McDonald and Van den Berg. As far as I am aware there is no algorithm that will correctly capitalise names in all cases (eg some Van den Berg families capitalise the 'd' and others don't, pretty much at random). So this is not a script that I, for one, would feel comfortable including as standard, at least without a lot of refinement that we simply don't have the resources to undertake.

We are happy to help disseminate the articles because many users have found them helpful. However for the reasons given above, they are offered for use at your own risk.

I hope this explanation helps.