My experience upgrading from 7.06 to 8.03

[skinnybloke]

Hi - just finished upgrading my first site from v7.06 Business to v8.03 Business. Still a few issues to sort out mainly around the search facility which I think may be due to issues with partial site deployment not always working which has been documented elsewhere.

Overall the upgrade was a lot less painfull than in upgrading previous versions.

The main issues I have had are:

1. When I imported my 7.06 snapshot into Actinic 8.03 on my Win2000 machine none of the section/product properties were imported. This worked fine when importing the same snapshot into Actinic 8.03 on my WinXP machine. I tried this several times with the same results.

2. Some of my image filenames include ampersands "&" and brackets "()". These images displayed ok on the section pages but were not displayed at all on the product pages. I had to rename these images, removing the non alphanumeric characters to correct this.

3. The upgrade renamed and capitilsed my searchable properties which stopped my search scripts working e.g. S_GiftFinder1_0 became S_GIFTFINDER0_0.

4. Import of deployed snapshot did not always work.

I also have a problem using scaled down images within the best sellers option. My normal thumbnails are 120px by 120px and I have rescaled them to be 90px x 90px. This leaves the edges looking ragged. Is there something I can do to correct this?

See top sellers on the right hand side of this page:

http://www.enjoy.co.uk/acatalog/Secret_Santa.html

[leehack]

For ragged edges use the "matte" facility if you have any decent imaging software.

[skinnybloke]

hi Lee - I am using Photoshop CS.

I thought the Matte facility was for images on transparent backgrounds. My images are all jpgs on white backgrounds.

The best seller images are just the thumbnail images that are displayed in the main body of the page scaled down on the fly to a smaller size.

[skinnybloke]

Another issue that may be worth mentioning for Actinic:

1. I changed an outer layout name and then created a partial snapshot. When I imported the snapshot onto another machine the site sections retained the old layout name. I had to manually select the new name from the dropdown list.

[leehack]

David

The matte facility is also available on jpegs and not exclusive to transparent images (usually gifs). From your post i read that you had rescaled these images and they then started showing ugly outlines etc. If you are saying it is the browser resizing them, then without creating dedicated thumbnails, i am not sure what you can do about that. I would still add a white matte to the master image and see if it helps.

[cdicken]

1. When I imported my 7.06 snapshot into Actinic 8.03 on my Win2000 machine none of the section/product properties were imported. This worked fine when importing the same snapshot into Actinic 8.03 on my WinXP machine. I tried this several times with the same results.

Hi there. Did the 'Site Upgrader' start after the database said it had been upgraded? It is this site upgrader that converts all the custom properties from your v7 store into v8 user-definable variables.

2. Some of my image filenames include ampersands "&" and brackets "()". These images displayed ok on the section pages but were not displayed at all on the product pages. I had to rename these images, removing the non alphanumeric characters to correct this.

Yes, a few other customers have reported this issue as well. I would always suggest using lower-case alphanumeric characters (with '_' or '-' as required) for images anyway, as that way you'll never encounter any browser issues with displaying images with non alphanumeric characters.

3. The upgrade renamed and capitilsed my searchable properties which stopped my search scripts working e.g. S_GiftFinder1_0 became S_GIFTFINDER0_0.

Variables in v8 work completely differently from v7 custom properties, but the upgrader carries out the conversion for you. I'm not surprised you would need to edit your custom search tools as this is a non-standard customisation which the upgrade will not be expecting.

[skinnybloke]

Did the 'Site Upgrader' start after the database said it had been upgraded? It is this site upgrader that converts all the custom properties from your v7 store into v8 user-definable variables.

Hi Chris - yes it did. Everything was converted excect these properties.

[skinnybloke]

Another issue that I have come across is that when I import a snapshot into machine 2 that was created using the "Deploy Site Snapshot" facility on machine 1, I get a problem with images on the extended info pages.

The extended info popup page shows a black dot on the page. When I look at the source code behind this the width and height for the image are 0px

<IMG SRC="92L.jpg" WIDTH=0 HEIGHT=0>

See http://www.enjoy.co.uk/acatalog/Deluxe_Santa_Hat.html

If I add new products the pop-up images work correctly

See http://www.enjoy.co.uk/acatalog/Punk_Duck.html

Looking at the source code on the pop-up for this new product page shows

<IMG SRC="Punk-Duck-L.jpg" WIDTH=500 HEIGHT=500>

[cdicken]

Hi David

I don't know about this one. I suggest getting in touch with Actinic via http://www.actinic.co.uk/support/register.htm and see if they can figure out what is happening.

The code you mention looks like v7 code rather than v8 code so one idea might be to go to 'Design | Library | Layouts' and locate the 'Extended Information Image' group, then right-click on the group name and select 'Revert to Factory Settings'. This will ensure that the images in your pop-up pages are using the correct v8 layouts and variables.

[skinnybloke]

Hi - V8 was using my V7 template(upgraded).

I copied and pasted the code from the 'Extended Information Image' into this and all now appears to be working correctly.