Template Monster: Public Service Announcement

to sbonge :

can you provide orders id and tickets id of 2 zencart templates you bought? I will fix the problem.

2 fellis

There's analysis of some of the problems with one of the templates to which sbonge refers in this thread. Hope it proves helpful.

2 kuroi:

I asked about order id because I wanna know why our support team didn't solve the problem. As tmonster said we have our support chat and ticket system, but poorly noone from support didn't have a look on this forum.

And the point of discussion is to create a proper zencart theme. then we will start a reproduction of all recent themes and we will send corrected themes to unsatisfied customers. May be Tmonster will provide any others ways of compensation I don't know it's not my job.

Besides we finally patched our theme with main table as in default theme. Now it looks ok in all browsers. Thank you Kim and other members. What do you think now about the theme? May be there are some small bugs, but i think now it rather good. Now it's also fluid.

http://osc.template-help.com/new_zen_test/ - new demo
http://osc.template-help.com/zen_new.zip - theme zip

2 fellis

I agree that your approach of reproducing from a sound base the template to which sbonge refers, would be better than trying to fix the individual problems that it contains.

sure our suppord Dept. works with individual problems. And we're fixing customers problems. But some customers came here to you, advanced zencart users, to ask for problems solutions.

2 kuroi - what do you think about the latest variant of our theme provided?

fellis:

2 kuroi - what do you think about the latest variant of our theme provided?My initial thoughts are that you have proven that it can be done as a liquid layout, but haven't specifically designed it as such. To be fair to yourselves therefore, you should set it back to fixed for demo purposes (and center it).

I haven't looked at the detail of it, but it is moving rapidly towards the lightweight over-rides that we much prefer. I think some eyebrows will be raised about it's failure to validate. That closing of an unopened form has been there unfixed through several iterations. And I think that there will be some disappointment that although you are now following much more closely the normal Zen Cart structure, you are still choosing to rename many of the key elements, which impedes our ability to apply our "advanced zencart skills" to your customers' problems.

But overall, this is a huge step forward, and provides a base from which to build BUT having simplified to get closer to getting the basics right, I very much hope that you will now work out how to build back in the bells and whistles that give your templates that extra special visual impact.

2 kuroi:

Yes I agree, this theme was not designer as fluid, however our goal was just to show you that we can produce stretched themes too.
And I switched it to 766px width back

and one more question:

"now following much more closely the normal Zen Cart structure, you are still choosing to rename many of the key elements, which impedes our ability to apply our "advanced zencart skills" to your customers' problems." -

can it be rephrased like we rename Css classes and id's? Is the problem here? Or am I wrong?

P.S. and thank you for your help. your posts exactly reflect the point of problem solutions. I very apreciate it.

and one more question to all:

At least a tried to validate the theme:
http://osc.template-help.com/new_zen_test/

I know there are some mistakes because it was codded in html 4.01 transitional ant zen-cart system supports XHTML 1.0 Transitional and I will correct the code at the end,

but! there are many mistakes such as "character "&" is the first character of a delimiter but occurred as data."

there are many products images which use "&" character on their alt tags
alt="Free Ship & Payment Virtual weight 10" And that comes with default product demo base installation. I know that I can manually remove the whole product base and add some products to test, but! as I realize zen-cart.com provides not validated demo product base. will it be corrected in future versions?

Kim said earlier in this thread that they are working on completely redoing the demo products. Therefore patches submitted by other people now would be wasted effort.

but! there are many mistakes such as "character "&" is the first character of a delimiter but occurred as data."

Those occur as warnings not as errors and will not affect the validation if everything else is valid.

ok. So This theme is validated. You can check the results at
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fosc.template-help.com%2Fnew_zen_test%2F

are there any other things to improve?

How about using CSS color for the backgrounds instead of images wherever you can? How about using a 1 px border instead of a graphical line?

Has the .zip file been updated yet?

fellis:

"now following much more closely the normal Zen Cart structure, you are still choosing to rename many of the key elements, which impedes our ability to apply our "advanced zencart skills" to your customers' problems." -

can it be rephrased like we rename Css classes and id's? Is the problem here? Or am I wrong?No, you have understood correctly.

There's another puzzle though. The downloadable version of your template, at which I had been looking, has an IE-specific stylesheet that is just 67 bytes in size. However, the one you actually use on your demo site is called from a different location and is 67,562 bytes in size, which is enormous for a stylesheet. Is there a reason for the difference, or is this something that will be ironed out as you finalise the implementation?

Here is the ticket ID QCN-579869

I opened the ticket on 6/20 and have below is the transcript of the exchanges with TM support.

The order numbers are #: 9492123, and #9478281.

Thanks

Scott

I purchased Template number #14411. The template works in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer 7.0. My transaction ID is XXXXXXXXX. The website is https://www.tru-fab.biz

When you open this website you will see that the prices on the bottom right overlay the text. Once again, this does not happen in Firefox.

Please advise.

Thanks

Scott

Sean Right Posted On: 20 Jun 2007 10:13 PM Dear Scott,

Your ticket will take a more thorough attention.
We are assigning this ticket a “Task Made” status which means that one of our technicians will take a close look at it. We’re sorry for the inconveniences caused by this. Please, expect for a response within nearest days.

Best regards,
Technical Support Department

Support Team
Phone: 1.518.312.4147

Posted On: 25 Jun 2007 06:55 AM Please provide an update on this ticket. This was the second $160 template I purchased. The first one was the "wrong" version of ZenCart. I asked specifically about the second one and I was told it was correct for the current version of ZenCart.

I have been reading some post on the ZenCart forum about the LACK of response from you all. I need this template fixed or my money refunded.

Sincerely,

Scott

Simon Kilgour Posted On: 25 Jun 2007 10:23 AM

Dear Scott,

Unfortunately your ticket is going to take some extra attention. We’re still working at your problem and will inform you about the status of your ticket in 24 hours.
We’re sorry for the inconveniences caused by this.

Support Team
Phone: 1.518.312.4147

Scott Bonge Posted On: 27 Jun 2007 11:49 AM

Thank you for your attention... I wanted to see if you had this issue fixed. I paid for two templates and neither of them work. That is $390 for nothing. PLEASE ADVISE!!!

fellis:

sure our suppord Dept. works with individual problems. And we're fixing customers problems. But some customers came here to you, advanced zencart users, to ask for problems solutions.

Just so you know>>> I asked your tech support for help before I got ANY help on this forum.

TM support team is not doing their job. Please see the script from an earlier post with TM support team.

Please...NO BS needed!!!

Scott

Fellis - TMonster -

Curiosity has gotten the best of me. Why did you change themes in the middle of this discussion instead of fixing the original which is much closer to your signature style?

that's the question I also want to ask, now the theme is more like Original zen template style, which is loosing the TM high quality design style.

Fellis, you should not sacrifice the high quality TM design in order to make template validated.

Kim:

Fellis - TMonster -

Curiosity has gotten the best of me. Why did you change themes in the middle of this discussion instead of fixing the original which is much closer to your signature style?

blade97:

you should not sacrifice the high quality TM design in order to make template validated.High quality design and validation are not incompatible. Indeed, a high quality design (as opposed to one that just looks good) should validate in order to give the user the benefits of accessibility, maintainability, ease of customisation and compatibility with future browser developments.

Hi to all.

I changed the theme because I was sick of previous. Thinking we now can produce right zencart themes. Because we’re talking last several days not about theme logic and main theme producing rules, but about coding issues… One design can be implemented to html code in several ways.
However, we tried to keep main coding principles like in _default theme. If you don’t have any serious remarks to this test theme, we will start zen-cart themes production on TM. Our customers wanna have quality zencart themes.
An d as I promised , we will re produce out old zencart templates according to new standards. And I will post corrected numbers here if you don’t mind. Thank you all for your help, you all are great guys. Thank you for spending your time to solve our issues. Think we will not argue in future, but be friends.
David promised to donate this template to you. You can download it from http://osc.template-help.com/zen_new.zip
Also we promised to create a collection of product icons and buttons for you. As I know zen-cart 1.38 will be produced in month or two. May be it will be good to implement new pictures there? If you will give me the list of images required to design we can design them in 3-5 days. Tomorrow David will return from his business trip and post his point of view here.

And also about this thread http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=30312 what shall we do just to reply to this topic - may be post here a numbers validated by you templates and new templates…
As to sbonge - support team solver his problem today. Sorry for big delay.