Site Owners - Upgrade from Pagelines Pro Results

[flidget 0]

We can all see that Framework is aimed at IT professionals developing multiple sites with different requirements, but what about the site owners who are upgrading from Pagelines Pro? How are we getting along? I've been hanging back from upgrading to Framework from Pagelines Pro for a few weeks now. Tonight I took a deep breath and pressed the button. Unsurprisingly the result was the inevitable mangling of my carefully crafted Pagelines Pro settings and a site that simply isn't useable without hours of work. Work which I've spent 2 years undertaking and will now have to repeat. Yes, I do have a sophisticated site that uses all the features that have had their parameters deprecated in this upgrade. It??™s not an upgrade I hear people shout ??“ well it is from my point of view, so don??™t even get started on that one! Anyway, my point is why was I not surprised? The answer is that there has never been a single upgrade that hasn't resulted in hours of repair work in the 2 years I've been using this Development Tool. I have to say, I would much rather have an update installation that did something useful than have a new piece of eye candy or the latest support for emerging standards. But then, I??™m not a full time developer. I know we pay next to nothing for this sophisticated beast compared to an upgrade of Adobe Dreamweaver, Oracle 11 or the latest Microsoft IDE, but that doesn't mean it's a cheap upgrade when you factor in all the time it will take to make it work again! In short, I'm growing weary of continually repairing my site after each upgrade. These people deprecate my configuration parameters like it??™s not even remotely important to maintain continuity never mind backwards compatibility. Tomorrow I will have to prepare my list of questions for the support team in an attempt to simply get back to where I was before the move to Framework. No doubt all the functionality I had before is still there, lurking in some new place that seems more object orientated and therefore correct. Pity it no longer has my 2 years of configuration associated with it! More flexible and more powerful we have yet to test. But I'm upset that to get this working again I have to invest more time, yet again, on repairs. Initially my first impressions are not good. I??™m concerned that all my existing pages don't list any of the new templates types. Actually, neither does the add new page! Oh and where did all the callout information go? It was there before and isn't there now? How much programming does it take to move data fields from one place to another (i.e. default template) - obviously lots - so let??™s not bother? It's too hard or too complicated and developers working on new sites don??™t need it anyway? Saddle up, here we go once more... Oh hang on I cannot remember all my configuration parameters, can I easily view the old ones? This doesn't seem to get a mention, but it would be quite handy wouldn't it? Anyone else want to add their comments, it looks like somebody from Pagelines might be listening to us at the moment? (PS) Yes, I have moved back to Pagelines Pro (well Platform Base actually) and it??™s true it is a non-destructive upgrade. I can flip between the two to repair Framework. This is an excellent feature which shows somebody knew upgrading to Framework was going to be a pain in the??¦..

[indakno 0]

You are not alone. One of my main issues is with the feature part of the new upgrade. It is not even upgraded properly to allow you to do the things that it says it allows you to do. It is completely different from the last version, and if you request help, you get that there will be repairs in an upgrade in which I actually had to take my site down and am waiting on that because the feature section is imperative to my site. *sigh* So, I will wait...and wait...and hopefully the good comments will soon outweigh the bad. I NEVER had to ask for support in the last version of this theme....NEVER. I could not tell you how many questions I've asked of Pagelines. I should have known there would be issues with the confusion of the upgraded name.

[Rob 547]

@flidget, I'm very sorry you're having issues with the conversion. I recognize your pain and felt it myself when I made my own conversion. Much to my astonishment all my widgets were moved all over the place making my site look like total (expletive). But what I soon discovered was that not one of them was actually removed, deleted or disappeared. They just were moved about. In a matter of five minutes, I was able to slide the widgets that belonged in Primary Sidebar back in place from the Universal Sidebar where they went. Just going through the various sidebars, and dragging the widgets to their proper location put my site back in place fast and easy. Like you, I had tons of customizations and volumes of CSS. Yes, some selectors changed but this forum does have published lists of the new selectors and I was able to adjust those in under 10 minutes. When I couldn't find the right ones, I just used Firebug for Firefox, found the new one and made my changes. It took me under 15 minutes total to recover from a major upgrade. When any new product replaces an older one, or changes are dramatic, there will invariably be some transitional difficulty and confusion but be assured, please, that we did keep this in mind. By the way, thanks for the kind mention because it was me that made sure we could bounce back and forth from old to new and back again without losing settings. I can't say my motive for that option was attributable to the reason you cited, but I did feel it important to be able to go back and forth easily. PageLines Framework is a major shift towards a better way of handling site design and I totally understand and sympathize with your angst. My site is one of the top 10 food sites and has been online for 15 years with about 2.6 Million monthly page views, so having it down for a minute is always problematic. You can imagine my sensitivity to downtime. The callout is actually located on any particular page, you can also scroll down, find the "Callout Media" tab under PageLines Meta Settings and include page specific callout media there and activate it on your page from that location (if not already active on that template). We now have multiple template types but not every one of them applies to pages, which some have found confusing. The PlatformPro method was, perhaps, a bit more cut and dried, but also lacked so many options that the public called for that our developers created a much more versatile, flexible system. Any template that applies to pages should show up on the drop down list on the page, provided you have all you default sections and plugins activated via Dashboard > Pagelines > Store under Sections and Plugins. Admittedly, this is a bit more complex, but when there are thousands of requests for variables and they are accommodated, any system will become more complicated. It's the nature of any technological advance, as I am sure you will concur. Most configuration parameters should remain in place and easily or automatically converted over. I have a custom Google leaderboard on my header and all I had to do was copy and paste one thing out of my old PlatformBase functions.php to my new one located inside the PageLines-Customize plugin. I realize this is little comfort to anyone who finds a conversion frustrating, but I hope everyone considers that we have increased our support mechanisms, added massive volumes of new documentation, ensured that forum posts are replied to by a dedicated team professional moderators and have gone in many cases well beyond what any other product would do to take care of our clients. Please feel free to post a topic for each issue you come across and we will be happy to assist.

[Rob 547]

@indakno Yes, you did post a number of topics, several on the topic of the feature slider but I hope you will admit that we never gave up on trying to help, even for the three topics you asked about in early 2011 for PlatformPro.