"Very deep customisation"? Do you even hear yourself? New Smugmug is about REMOVING very deep customisation. Smugmug is now just a template driven site.
Is it your plan to continue to move Smugmug away from customisation and towards just have better templates?
Cheers - N
SM has removed the full-customisation functionality and yet still can't admit it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ whoALSE => Allen
One form of time travel is thru Captured Moments
Mostly because their changes have broken _CORE FUNCTIONALITY_ I spent hundreds of hours building. That core functionality is NOT AVAILABLE in the New Smugmug.
Now, is that a fair reason to be upset?
Cheers - N
Well said....
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ whoALSE => Allen
One form of time travel is thru Captured Moments
"Very deep customisation"? Do you even hear yourself? New Smugmug is about REMOVING very deep customisation. Smugmug is now just a template driven site.
Is it your plan to continue to move Smugmug away from customisation and towards just have better templates?
Cheers - N
Goodness. I'd forgotten that quote. That sort of runs shivers up your spine. When was that? What happened in-between, one must wonder? I s'pose we'll never really know. I'm not just whining; I'm being very honest when I say that I feel very sad about all this. I remember so vividly how proud I was when I'd gotten a lot of those deep customizations in place. I don't know when I'll feel ready to face the reality of the new site.
That's pretty sanctimonious from someone who left SM's employ some time back and decides to come back to the dgrin forums in support of SM's new 'platform', Andy.
Andy left SM, but has continued to contribute here on the dgrin forums - just not in his previous capacity. He didn't "come back" - he never left...
I have questions about transition. Read the blog, and a few first and last pages here about the changes, don't have time to read everything, so excuse me if this has been addressed somewhere (I think the answers belong in an update of the blog post announcing the new SM...)
1. Can I continue without migration, with the old SM? For how long?
2. If I migrate, preview, and don't like what I see, can I go back? (This from the blog post makes me think not: "Migrating and unveiling is a one-way street." Or does it really become one-way (no turning back) only after unveiling?)
3. Are videos in Basic level only available after migration? (I have a Power account primarily for videos, tried to downgrade to Basic, and got a warning that I'd lose the HD Video capability -- is this warning an oversight and I can ignore it, or maybe it's right because I haven't migrated yet...)
I have questions about transition. Read the blog, and a few first and last pages here about the changes, don't have time to read everything, so excuse me if this has been addressed somewhere (I think the answers belong in an update of the blog post announcing the new SM...)
1. Can I continue without migration, with the old SM? For how long?
2. If I migrate, preview, and don't like what I see, can I go back? (This from the blog post makes me think not: "Migrating and unveiling is a one-way street." Or does it really become one-way (no turning back) only after unveiling?)
3. Are videos in Basic level only available after migration? (I have a Power account primarily for videos, tried to downgrade to Basic, and got a warning that I'd lose the HD Video capability -- is this warning an oversight and I can ignore it, or maybe it's right because I haven't migrated yet...)
Thank you.
Hi!
To answer your questions.
1) Yes, you can stay on Legacy SmugMug. While a date hasn't been established, it is safe to say you still have many months.
2) Once Migrated, You have the option to use BOTH Legacy and new SmugMug. Only after you "Unveil" can you not go back. The unveil process involves typing in the word unveil after you push some buttons so their is NO WAY you can accidentally do this.
3) I will check, not 100% sure.
1) Yes, you can stay on Legacy SmugMug. While a date hasn't been established, it is safe to say you still have many months.
2) Once Migrated, You have the option to use BOTH Legacy and new SmugMug. Only after you "Unveil" can you not go back. The unveil process involves typing in the word unveil after you push some buttons so their is NO WAY you can accidentally do this.
3) I will check, not 100% sure.
Thank you for the answers.
On #2, the blog post says "there are now 3 possible states of SmugMug: Non-migrated SmugMug accounts (legacy), accounts in private preview (migrated), and the new SmugMug", and the following text makes it sound like the "private preview" mode is some transitional thing where not everything quite works the same on the legacy site (e.g. "If you create new galleries in preview mode, they will be visible on your current SmugMug site in a new category called ‘Smug Preview’"). What I want to know is if it's possible to go from the 2nd state (preview) back to the 1st (legacy). Or did I misunderstand that and there's no reason to, and the legacy site and all its features are truly unchanged until the transition into the 3rd and final state?
I have questions about transition. Read the blog, and a few first and last pages here about the changes, don't have time to read everything, so excuse me if this has been addressed somewhere (I think the answers belong in an update of the blog post announcing the new SM...)
1. Can I continue without migration, with the old SM? For how long?
2. If I migrate, preview, and don't like what I see, can I go back? (This from the blog post makes me think not: "Migrating and unveiling is a one-way street." Or does it really become one-way (no turning back) only after unveiling?)
3. Are videos in Basic level only available after migration? (I have a Power account primarily for videos, tried to downgrade to Basic, and got a warning that I'd lose the HD Video capability -- is this warning an oversight and I can ignore it, or maybe it's right because I haven't migrated yet...)
Thank you.
You should assume that migration MAY damage your legacy site and customizations. There have been a lot of post from people who are certain that it did. After I migrated, my customizations which I had not touched in a few days became corrupted. I had to replace them all from my back-up files. This may have been caused by migration, or by system wide changes made by Smugmug.
If you do not have the time or ability to fix your site yourself, I think you should wait a while before migrating. You should definitely avoid opening any gallery that is connected to your legacy site from the new Smugmug.
During this time of transition there is a very high demand on the Smugmug Heroes. Although they are working tirelessly to respond to every request, they are very busy and there may be a significant delay in getting assistance.
Migrating will cause some irreversible changes to your site, eg. uploads will go to the new smug folder and will have to be moved to the old site. To the best of my knowledge, you can not un-do migration.
My current plan is to stick with my legacy site for at least a year, or until that option ends. At that time I will decide if Smugmug meets my needs or if another provider can offer a better option.
The Current Smugmug does not provide what I want. If I couldn't use my legacy site I would have to go elsewhere.
On #2, the blog post says "there are now 3 possible states of SmugMug: Non-migrated SmugMug accounts (legacy), accounts in private preview (migrated), and the new SmugMug", and the following text makes it sound like the "private preview" mode is some transitional thing where not everything quite works the same on the legacy site (e.g. "If you create new galleries in preview mode, they will be visible on your current SmugMug site in a new category called ‘Smug Preview’"). What I want to know is if it's possible to go from the 2nd state (preview) back to the 1st (legacy). Or did I misunderstand that and there's no reason to, and the legacy site and all its features are truly unchanged until the transition into the 3rd and final state?
You can work on both states of your site in the "Migrated" mode. I would suggest uploading new photos in Legacy if you don't want them to be automatically placed in the SmugMug Preview folder. Besides that, nothing in your legacy will change while you build out your new SmugMug site.
On #2, the blog post says "there are now 3 possible states of SmugMug: Non-migrated SmugMug accounts (legacy), accounts in private preview (migrated), and the new SmugMug", and the following text makes it sound like the "private preview" mode is some transitional thing where not everything quite works the same on the legacy site (e.g. "If you create new galleries in preview mode, they will be visible on your current SmugMug site in a new category called ‘Smug Preview’"). What I want to know is if it's possible to go from the 2nd state (preview) back to the 1st (legacy). Or did I misunderstand that and there's no reason to, and the legacy site and all its features are truly unchanged until the transition into the 3rd and final state?
Part of the migration already happened without you doing anything.
Something SM did as part of the new system corrupted several (probably more) users galleries even though they never even entered Preview mode.
They did figure it out and correct the problem, but based on what happened I would hazard to guess that at least a partial migration (or conversion if you prefer) has already been performed on every SM user.
My questions in the customization forum haven't gotten any love, can anyone please answer these two?
- what about blog integration and the new SM?
- can the backgrounds on the Arrow or Turbo themes be changed to be slideshows? or at least a different image at each page load instead of 1 static image?
Mostly because their changes have broken _CORE FUNCTIONALITY_ I spent hundreds of hours building. That core functionality is NOT AVAILABLE in the New Smugmug.
Now, is that a fair reason to be upset?
Cheers - N
Neil,
Could you please elaborate on what "core functionality" you can no longer achieve in the new SM? I am really trying to understand what you mean by this. In IT core functionality typically refers to the main elements allowing your site to run or not without it. Obviously we know custom javascript isn't supported anymore. But I've never considered that feature 'core functionality' in SM's case. In taking a look at your current site I honestly couldn't see where core aspects couldn't be migrated to the new SM. But obviously there is something there you have in mind.
My questions in the customization forum haven't gotten any love, can anyone please answer these two?
- what about blog integration and the new SM?
- can the backgrounds on the Arrow or Turbo themes be changed to be slideshows? or at least a different image at each page load instead of 1 static image?
Thanks!
Blog integration is a feature request we are well aware of, but nope, it is not there yet. But you could easily customize the 2 platforms to match looks.
You can change the background image per page, you would just need to have a unique Theme on each page, since the background image is set in the "Theme" tab on Customization.
I made this video to show you how it's done per page.
Could you please elaborate on what "core functionality" you can no longer achieve in the new SM? I am really trying to understand what you mean by this. In IT core functionality typically refers to the main elements allowing your site to run or not without it. Obviously we know custom javascript isn't supported. But I've never considered that feature 'core functionality' in SM's case. In taking a look at your current site I honestly couldn't see where core aspects couldn't be migrated to the new SM. But obviously there is something there you have in mind.
For me, it's the difference in being able to effectively sell to people IN MY OWN COUNTRY AT ALL.
Smugmug has only recently introduced any international currency support, and it's a bad implementation - only supporting a few currencies (not NZD) and they still don't support self fulfilment. The cost and time of sending prints to NZ is prohibitive.
I spent a long time creating a paypal integration that allows me to sell photos to people in New Zealand, charging them in NZ Dollars, and getting it so that the emails that came through to me had sufficient information in them for me to efficiently identify the right image and size purchased.
So to me, that's core functionality. Without it I simply couldn't use smugmug to sell images - at least not to my target audience of New Zealanders. I have had endless debates about USD vs NZD and you're just going to have to take my word for it... When I switched to a paypal cart in NZD vs Smugmug in USD, even though I kept the prices the same my sales more than quadrupled.
Without Javascript I might as well turn off all ordering options and hope people email me and ask for prices...
Blog integration is a feature request we are well aware of, but nope, it is not there yet. But you could easily customize the 2 platforms to match looks.
You can change the background image per page, you would just need to have a unique Theme on each page, since the background image is set in the "Theme" tab on Customization.
I made this video to show you how it's done per page.
It would be good to decouple themes and background images, so eg each gallery could have a different background, but it would still be easy to make theme/colour changes sitewide
For me, it's the difference in being able to effectively sell to people IN MY OWN COUNTRY AT ALL.
Smugmug has only recently introduced any international currency support, and it's a bad implementation - only supporting a few currencies (not NZD) and they still don't support self fulfilment. The cost and time of sending prints to NZ is prohibitive.
I spent a long time creating a paypal integration that allows me to sell photos to people in New Zealand, charging them in NZ Dollars, and getting it so that the emails that came through to me had sufficient information in them for me to efficiently identify the right image and size purchased.
So to me, that's core functionality. Without it I simply couldn't use smugmug to sell images - at least not to my target audience of New Zealanders. I have had endless debates about USD vs NZD and you're just going to have to take my word for it... When I switched to a paypal cart in NZD vs Smugmug in USD, even though I kept the prices the same my sales more than quadrupled.
Without Javascript I might as well turn off all ordering options and hope people email me and ask for prices...
THAT is what this upgrade does to me.
Cheers - N
Thanks for the honest answer. I think your Use Case is a valid one and important for your business. I also know that a feature request has been made to add Javascript back. For the majority its a 'nice to have' where they get to do more custom stuff with their slideshows, etc... But in your case there is a direct business impact rather than some cosmetic preference. I would seriously consider writing SM about this. While that doesn't mean they will necessarily change their current policy its at least worth a shot. If I were in your shoes I might have to consider other options based on these unique business requirements.
I'd just hate to see you have to move everything somewhere else (= a ton of work) only to find a couple months later JS has been added back to SM. And what other hosting company would provide JS support at this level of legacy SM? That's a tough one to find especially at such a reasonable price.
If not your best option may wind up being setting a site up yourself with your own hosting company. I did that once and used a few open source products such as Coppermine and Gallery2. But in the end SM was just a better deal all around. Of course I didn't have those business requirements, especially dealing with foreign currency.
It would be good to decouple themes and background images, so eg each gallery could have a different background, but it would still be easy to make theme/colour changes sitewide
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I suggested almost precisely this idea back when the new site was still in the early stages of design. I said how it would give much greater flexibility & individuality if these were decoupled (I didn't use that word) and that the old site has been limited by this. (in the old site, navigation & certain colors were linked directly to certain themes). If you wanted the same style but different color, there were some options for doing this with CSS, but often you were stuck. I thought the new site would absolutely address that. Let's hope it still will....
[QUOTEAnd what other hosting company would provide JS support at this level of legacy SM? That's a tough one to find especially at such a reasonable price.
.[/QUOTE]
I believe photoshelter supports javascript customisation.
I believe photoshelter supports javascript customisation.
...And I believe Photoshelter costs $360-$600 per year, with a 60GB-1TB cap on hosting. So there is definitely a drastic difference in the overall business model and feature set, IMO. I'm sure Photoshelter is a great option, don't get me wrong, I'm just saying that it still seems pretty hard to compete with what SmugMug is offering for $150-$300 / year.
Could you please elaborate on what "core functionality" you can no longer achieve in the new SM? I am really trying to understand what you mean by this. In IT core functionality typically refers to the main elements allowing your site to run or not without it. Obviously we know custom javascript isn't supported anymore. But I've never considered that feature 'core functionality' in SM's case. In taking a look at your current site I honestly couldn't see where core aspects couldn't be migrated to the new SM. But obviously there is something there you have in mind.
Thanks for the honest answer. I think your Use Case is a valid one and important for your business. I also know that a feature request has been made to add Javascript back. For the majority its a 'nice to have' where they get to do more custom stuff with their slideshows, etc... But in your case there is a direct business impact rather than some cosmetic preference. I would seriously consider writing SM about this. While that doesn't mean they will necessarily change their current policy its at least worth a shot. If I were in your shoes I might have to consider other options based on these unique business requirements.
I'd just hate to see you have to move everything somewhere else (= a ton of work) only to find a couple months later JS has been added back to SM. And what other hosting company would provide JS support at this level of legacy SM? That's a tough one to find especially at such a reasonable price.
If not your best option may wind up being setting a site up yourself with your own hosting company. I did that once and used a few open source products such as Coppermine and Gallery2. But in the end SM was just a better deal all around. Of course I didn't have those business requirements, especially dealing with foreign currency.
Current (Old) Smugmug is a perfect solution for me - despite their glacial feature development, US centric approach and lack of good foreign currency support, precisely because I could fix the issues myself. The underlying product suits me just great. I don't want to worry about features, running a site myself etc.
I am already evaluating if I can make Zenfolio look nice enough - they support NZD for self fulfilment and have baked in paypal support. The site will end up looking just like the other Zenfolio sites though and that irks me.
I would definitely stay if SM could say that JS is coming back and I'll be able to continue using Paypal in the way I am now - or if they were to commit to keeping the legacy site running until self fulfilment and paypal (with all currencies) are baked into their service offering...
However Smugmug don't do that. They over promise, they deliver half baked solutions before they are ready, and they NEVER confirm what features they are working on.
It took over 5 years to get one of their most heavily requested features added (foreign currency support) and it was a half baked solution when they got it. It would be irresponsible to just hope they are going to deliver a feature in a reasonable timeframe - their history on that is awful.
If you work in the IT industry then you will also realize that SM's rewrite was one of the most challenging of its kind. The reason for this = massive numbers of customers who have so much of there own code spaghetti twisted throughout their sites. For developers, hackers and the like it was a wonderful thing no other host would even consider offering. So we had all these elaborate customizations to the point that it almost became similar to an open source project with all the various contributors. Unfortunately all that freedom meant a living nightmare when it was time to rearchitect. So now I think some Major lessons learned have occurred as a result. While we still do have great freedom, more than almost any host, certain things have been reigned in. Can anyone say 'Stop the Insanity!'
Will things like the new slideshow evolve and improve over time based on user feedback? I think that's a reasonable assumption or at a the very least something SM will consider. But it's nothing to lose sleep over IMO. Will all the JFriend scripts and umteen other customization scripts, tricks, hacks, etc... continue? I don't see the need as much now. But with certain custom code options still open I think there will be some. They actually left in more custom code options than I was anticipating for this initial roll out.
Derek, are you a software developer? You seem to understand the situation very well.
As for the slideshow, we winced at the very basic one we had to ship with in order to make our date, and you can bet we want really great ones as badly as you do as soon as we can get them to market.
As for things like statcounter, this is an area where greeting thousands of new customers every week is quite a perspective-changer. Of those thousands, perhaps a handful are willing to go to dgrin and get a stat counter app and install it. The vast majority just want it built in.
As for JavaScript, this message keeps getting buried with all the traffic, so feel free to refer to it when people ask in various threads: we planned to include it in this release and like you we were disappointed when we couldn't pull it off. But we have to do it responsibly and that's a very big challenge, hence the reason it's so hard to come by on photo hosting sites.
I think what you'll see is trusted customizers using JavaScript first, not because we have some financial relationship with them, but because the deployment is difficult and we want to get our feet wet with them first.
[snip]
As for JavaScript, this message keeps getting buried with all the traffic, so feel free to refer to it when people ask in various threads: we planned to include it in this release and like you we were disappointed when we couldn't pull it off. But we have to do it responsibly and that's a very big challenge, hence the reason it's so hard to come by on photo hosting sites.
I think what you'll see is trusted customizers using JavaScript first, not because we have some financial relationship with them, but because the deployment is difficult and we want to get our feet wet with them first.
Thanks for this sir... I have to say this tiny change to acknowledge something that is being worked on relaxes me hugely.
Any chance you could go further and say that people using JS won't be left out in the cold in terms of having SM Classic killed before JS is introduced to new SM?
I LOVE the look of some of the new SM sites... It would kill me to have to go and make an uglier site in Zenfolio.
I think what you'll see is trusted customizers using JavaScript first, not because we have some financial relationship with them, but because the deployment is difficult and we want to get our feet wet with them first.
Thanks for the clarification. Hopefully we'll be able to get our hands on it soon too!
Ultimately I personally don't care whether e.g. Google +1s /[fill in your favourite javascript functionality] are a built in feature anyone can drag and drop, or an empty code box I can fill in myself.
But I would like at least one of those options, and sooner rather than later.
Any chance you could go further and say that people using JS won't be left out in the cold in terms of having SM Classic killed before JS is introduced to new SM?
Somewhere an official source said it would be many months before legacy was killed off. I really hope its not many months before a suitable way forward is found.
Derek, are you a software developer? You seem to understand the situation very well.
...
Yes, I've been doing this kind of thing for many years and so feel your pain! The scope and scale of this latest release was obviously quite extensive. It was a pretty bold move on your part to go back to the drawing board like you did and for that I applaud you! Not many companies would be willing to do that. I would guess it was one the largest of its kind in SM history.
The other problem is its harder for the typical customer to understand all the behind the scenes work that really goes into a full redesign and rearchitecture. Unless they can see it on the GUI it sounds like just making stuff up or stalling for time. But obviously quite the opposite was true. You guys were busting your tails to get the thing out! Then you got yelled at (by some) for not taking longer to add in all that they wanted. Same thing would have happened if you released JS before fully baked. The response would have been 'Look, you broke my code! Why didn't you wait to test it more to get it right?'
Either way I think it was a huge success on your part. Most legacy customers will begin to see the light as issues get resolved and they can sit back and fully enjoy the vastly improved new SM with far less effort than ever before.
I think what's hard to understand for many people who had heavily customized sites on Legacy SmugMug was how ineffective the system was for others. The vast majority of SmugMug customers a month ago had little or no customization. We browsed through thousands of them. Their sites were relatively bland and out of date. If you paid a customizer hundreds of dollars or had knowledge of CSS/HTML and had time to customize, you could get a nice-looking site. But otherwise you were out of luck.
It was an absolutely agonizing decision for us to make, to blow away old customization and make people start over. Many of our very best and most loyal customers had spent long hours tinkering on their site to get it looking just right. It was also very, very difficult for us to rebuild everything from the ground up. I have never been involved with anything in my professional career that was so complicated and challenging.
Our main goal for over a decade has been quite simple: build the best possible tools for passionate photographers to display, share, and sell their photos. But the old system simply made it too difficult for most to get a beautiful site. We were failing our customers.
It has been both rewarding and depressing to see the responses over the past week. Thousands of people who were stuck with the legacy default now have dramatically improved sites. On average, SmugMug sites are considerably more beautiful than they were before. But some people who had spent long hours customizing are understandably frustrated. I just hope you'll give us a chance to continue to improve things and move the platform along.
I had many customizations on my site along with the many hours it took to get there, and I am loving the new site, but still miss some of the things that I used to rely on, at the moment it's statcounter and the new pages and the old html now not showing has caused me to loose SEO for those pages because I had to create new 'page' pages, that are now starting to return errors to Google. In time that will heal.
I think that the new auto screen resizing will improve the SEO overall for the future.
Those are the only major issues that I have left though, I do like that so many bugs have been squashed so fast, and I like the improvements so far.
Keep up the good work, and thanks for working on it as hard as you guys are.
But the old system simply made it too difficult for most to get a beautiful site. We were failing our customers.
-snip-
On average, SmugMug sites are considerably more beautiful than they were before. But some people who had spent long hours customizing are understandably frustrated. I just hope you'll give us a chance to continue to improve things and move the platform along.
You're talking a lot about beautiful sites and how customisation made sites more beautiful. I agree, there are some very lovely sites coming out, and hopefully mine will be much lovelier when I'm in a position to push the button.
You've not really mentioned the fact that much of the customisation was used to make a photo hosting site a more practical business front, with features like self-fulfillment, custom contact forms, integrated calendars/booking systems,visitor tracking etc. If it was just about aesthetics I don't think as many of us hardcore customisers would be feeling as frustrated.
I was about 30 minutes off going live tonight, before I was alerted to the fact that the workaround customers had been using to embed wufoo contact forms on their site has been 'fixed' without warning (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1890993).
You're talking a lot about beautiful sites and how customisation made sites more beautiful. I agree, there are some very lovely sites coming out, and hopefully mine will be much lovelier when I'm in a position to push the button.
You've not really mentioned the fact that much of the customisation was used to make a photo hosting site a more practical business front, with features like self-fulfillment, custom contact forms, integrated calendars/booking systems,visitor tracking etc. If it was just about aesthetics I don't think as many of us hardcore customisers would be feeling as frustrated.
I was about 30 minutes off going live tonight, before I was alerted to the fact that the workaround customers had been using to embed wufoo contact forms on their site has been 'fixed' without warning (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1890993).
Paul, feel free to blame me for the lack of warning if you are looking for someone to blame. This forum is my responsibility. It looks like code change that happened made it so that workaround was no longer usable. I am not a developer though, so I am not up to the minute with every single ounce of code, but again, it doesn't matter. My forum, my responsibility.
As Baldy and Sheaf stated above, we WANT to give you all these tools you need, like WuFoo. We just need to implement them in the correct way after careful research and QA. We are asking for you to individually list all the JS tools you needed in Legacy in the Feature Request Forum
Comments
SM has removed the full-customisation functionality and yet still can't admit it.
whoALSE => Allen
One form of time travel is thru Captured Moments
whoALSE => Allen
One form of time travel is thru Captured Moments
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
Andy left SM, but has continued to contribute here on the dgrin forums - just not in his previous capacity. He didn't "come back" - he never left...
1. Can I continue without migration, with the old SM? For how long?
2. If I migrate, preview, and don't like what I see, can I go back? (This from the blog post makes me think not: "Migrating and unveiling is a one-way street." Or does it really become one-way (no turning back) only after unveiling?)
3. Are videos in Basic level only available after migration? (I have a Power account primarily for videos, tried to downgrade to Basic, and got a warning that I'd lose the HD Video capability -- is this warning an oversight and I can ignore it, or maybe it's right because I haven't migrated yet...)
Thank you.
Hi!
To answer your questions.
1) Yes, you can stay on Legacy SmugMug. While a date hasn't been established, it is safe to say you still have many months.
2) Once Migrated, You have the option to use BOTH Legacy and new SmugMug. Only after you "Unveil" can you not go back. The unveil process involves typing in the word unveil after you push some buttons so their is NO WAY you can accidentally do this.
3) I will check, not 100% sure.
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Thank you for the answers.
On #2, the blog post says "there are now 3 possible states of SmugMug: Non-migrated SmugMug accounts (legacy), accounts in private preview (migrated), and the new SmugMug", and the following text makes it sound like the "private preview" mode is some transitional thing where not everything quite works the same on the legacy site (e.g. "If you create new galleries in preview mode, they will be visible on your current SmugMug site in a new category called ‘Smug Preview’"). What I want to know is if it's possible to go from the 2nd state (preview) back to the 1st (legacy). Or did I misunderstand that and there's no reason to, and the legacy site and all its features are truly unchanged until the transition into the 3rd and final state?
You should assume that migration MAY damage your legacy site and customizations. There have been a lot of post from people who are certain that it did. After I migrated, my customizations which I had not touched in a few days became corrupted. I had to replace them all from my back-up files. This may have been caused by migration, or by system wide changes made by Smugmug.
If you do not have the time or ability to fix your site yourself, I think you should wait a while before migrating. You should definitely avoid opening any gallery that is connected to your legacy site from the new Smugmug.
During this time of transition there is a very high demand on the Smugmug Heroes. Although they are working tirelessly to respond to every request, they are very busy and there may be a significant delay in getting assistance.
Migrating will cause some irreversible changes to your site, eg. uploads will go to the new smug folder and will have to be moved to the old site. To the best of my knowledge, you can not un-do migration.
My current plan is to stick with my legacy site for at least a year, or until that option ends. At that time I will decide if Smugmug meets my needs or if another provider can offer a better option.
The Current Smugmug does not provide what I want. If I couldn't use my legacy site I would have to go elsewhere.
You can work on both states of your site in the "Migrated" mode. I would suggest uploading new photos in Legacy if you don't want them to be automatically placed in the SmugMug Preview folder. Besides that, nothing in your legacy will change while you build out your new SmugMug site.
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Part of the migration already happened without you doing anything.
Something SM did as part of the new system corrupted several (probably more) users galleries even though they never even entered Preview mode.
They did figure it out and correct the problem, but based on what happened I would hazard to guess that at least a partial migration (or conversion if you prefer) has already been performed on every SM user.
- what about blog integration and the new SM?
- can the backgrounds on the Arrow or Turbo themes be changed to be slideshows? or at least a different image at each page load instead of 1 static image?
Thanks!
Neil,
Could you please elaborate on what "core functionality" you can no longer achieve in the new SM? I am really trying to understand what you mean by this. In IT core functionality typically refers to the main elements allowing your site to run or not without it. Obviously we know custom javascript isn't supported anymore. But I've never considered that feature 'core functionality' in SM's case. In taking a look at your current site I honestly couldn't see where core aspects couldn't be migrated to the new SM. But obviously there is something there you have in mind.
My Smugmug Gallery
Blog integration is a feature request we are well aware of, but nope, it is not there yet. But you could easily customize the 2 platforms to match looks.
You can change the background image per page, you would just need to have a unique Theme on each page, since the background image is set in the "Theme" tab on Customization.
I made this video to show you how it's done per page.
http://www.mb-photography-sf.com/SmugMug-Video-Help-Folder/SmugMug-Video-Help/i-BksG3bG/A
Hope this helps!
Michael
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For me, it's the difference in being able to effectively sell to people IN MY OWN COUNTRY AT ALL.
Smugmug has only recently introduced any international currency support, and it's a bad implementation - only supporting a few currencies (not NZD) and they still don't support self fulfilment. The cost and time of sending prints to NZ is prohibitive.
I spent a long time creating a paypal integration that allows me to sell photos to people in New Zealand, charging them in NZ Dollars, and getting it so that the emails that came through to me had sufficient information in them for me to efficiently identify the right image and size purchased.
So to me, that's core functionality. Without it I simply couldn't use smugmug to sell images - at least not to my target audience of New Zealanders. I have had endless debates about USD vs NZD and you're just going to have to take my word for it... When I switched to a paypal cart in NZD vs Smugmug in USD, even though I kept the prices the same my sales more than quadrupled.
Without Javascript I might as well turn off all ordering options and hope people email me and ask for prices...
THAT is what this upgrade does to me.
Cheers - N
http://www.nzsnaps.com (talkiet.smugmug.com)
It would be good to decouple themes and background images, so eg each gallery could have a different background, but it would still be easy to make theme/colour changes sitewide
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Thanks for the honest answer. I think your Use Case is a valid one and important for your business. I also know that a feature request has been made to add Javascript back. For the majority its a 'nice to have' where they get to do more custom stuff with their slideshows, etc... But in your case there is a direct business impact rather than some cosmetic preference. I would seriously consider writing SM about this. While that doesn't mean they will necessarily change their current policy its at least worth a shot. If I were in your shoes I might have to consider other options based on these unique business requirements.
I'd just hate to see you have to move everything somewhere else (= a ton of work) only to find a couple months later JS has been added back to SM. And what other hosting company would provide JS support at this level of legacy SM? That's a tough one to find especially at such a reasonable price.
If not your best option may wind up being setting a site up yourself with your own hosting company. I did that once and used a few open source products such as Coppermine and Gallery2. But in the end SM was just a better deal all around. Of course I didn't have those business requirements, especially dealing with foreign currency.
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.[/QUOTE]
I believe photoshelter supports javascript customisation.
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=Matt=
My SmugMug Portfolio • My Astro-Landscape Photo Blog • Dgrin Weddings Forum
Current (Old) Smugmug is a perfect solution for me - despite their glacial feature development, US centric approach and lack of good foreign currency support, precisely because I could fix the issues myself. The underlying product suits me just great. I don't want to worry about features, running a site myself etc.
I am already evaluating if I can make Zenfolio look nice enough - they support NZD for self fulfilment and have baked in paypal support. The site will end up looking just like the other Zenfolio sites though and that irks me.
I would definitely stay if SM could say that JS is coming back and I'll be able to continue using Paypal in the way I am now - or if they were to commit to keeping the legacy site running until self fulfilment and paypal (with all currencies) are baked into their service offering...
However Smugmug don't do that. They over promise, they deliver half baked solutions before they are ready, and they NEVER confirm what features they are working on.
It took over 5 years to get one of their most heavily requested features added (foreign currency support) and it was a half baked solution when they got it. It would be irresponsible to just hope they are going to deliver a feature in a reasonable timeframe - their history on that is awful.
Cheers - N
http://www.nzsnaps.com (talkiet.smugmug.com)
As for the slideshow, we winced at the very basic one we had to ship with in order to make our date, and you can bet we want really great ones as badly as you do as soon as we can get them to market.
As for things like statcounter, this is an area where greeting thousands of new customers every week is quite a perspective-changer. Of those thousands, perhaps a handful are willing to go to dgrin and get a stat counter app and install it. The vast majority just want it built in.
As for JavaScript, this message keeps getting buried with all the traffic, so feel free to refer to it when people ask in various threads: we planned to include it in this release and like you we were disappointed when we couldn't pull it off. But we have to do it responsibly and that's a very big challenge, hence the reason it's so hard to come by on photo hosting sites.
I think what you'll see is trusted customizers using JavaScript first, not because we have some financial relationship with them, but because the deployment is difficult and we want to get our feet wet with them first.
Thanks for this sir... I have to say this tiny change to acknowledge something that is being worked on relaxes me hugely.
Any chance you could go further and say that people using JS won't be left out in the cold in terms of having SM Classic killed before JS is introduced to new SM?
I LOVE the look of some of the new SM sites... It would kill me to have to go and make an uglier site in Zenfolio.
Cheers - N
http://www.nzsnaps.com (talkiet.smugmug.com)
Thanks for the clarification. Hopefully we'll be able to get our hands on it soon too!
Ultimately I personally don't care whether e.g. Google +1s /[fill in your favourite javascript functionality] are a built in feature anyone can drag and drop, or an empty code box I can fill in myself.
But I would like at least one of those options, and sooner rather than later.
Somewhere an official source said it would be many months before legacy was killed off. I really hope its not many months before a suitable way forward is found.
Yes, I've been doing this kind of thing for many years and so feel your pain!
The other problem is its harder for the typical customer to understand all the behind the scenes work that really goes into a full redesign and rearchitecture. Unless they can see it on the GUI it sounds like just making stuff up or stalling for time. But obviously quite the opposite was true. You guys were busting your tails to get the thing out! Then you got yelled at (by some) for not taking longer to add in all that they wanted.
Either way I think it was a huge success on your part. Most legacy customers will begin to see the light as issues get resolved and they can sit back and fully enjoy the vastly improved new SM with far less effort than ever before.
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It was an absolutely agonizing decision for us to make, to blow away old customization and make people start over. Many of our very best and most loyal customers had spent long hours tinkering on their site to get it looking just right. It was also very, very difficult for us to rebuild everything from the ground up. I have never been involved with anything in my professional career that was so complicated and challenging.
Our main goal for over a decade has been quite simple: build the best possible tools for passionate photographers to display, share, and sell their photos. But the old system simply made it too difficult for most to get a beautiful site. We were failing our customers.
It has been both rewarding and depressing to see the responses over the past week. Thousands of people who were stuck with the legacy default now have dramatically improved sites. On average, SmugMug sites are considerably more beautiful than they were before. But some people who had spent long hours customizing are understandably frustrated. I just hope you'll give us a chance to continue to improve things and move the platform along.
I think that the new auto screen resizing will improve the SEO overall for the future.
Those are the only major issues that I have left though, I do like that so many bugs have been squashed so fast, and I like the improvements so far.
Keep up the good work, and thanks for working on it as hard as you guys are.
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You're talking a lot about beautiful sites and how customisation made sites more beautiful. I agree, there are some very lovely sites coming out, and hopefully mine will be much lovelier when I'm in a position to push the button.
You've not really mentioned the fact that much of the customisation was used to make a photo hosting site a more practical business front, with features like self-fulfillment, custom contact forms, integrated calendars/booking systems,visitor tracking etc. If it was just about aesthetics I don't think as many of us hardcore customisers would be feeling as frustrated.
I was about 30 minutes off going live tonight, before I was alerted to the fact that the workaround customers had been using to embed wufoo contact forms on their site has been 'fixed' without warning (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1890993).
Paul, feel free to blame me for the lack of warning if you are looking for someone to blame. This forum is my responsibility. It looks like code change that happened made it so that workaround was no longer usable. I am not a developer though, so I am not up to the minute with every single ounce of code, but again, it doesn't matter. My forum, my responsibility.
As Baldy and Sheaf stated above, we WANT to give you all these tools you need, like WuFoo. We just need to implement them in the correct way after careful research and QA. We are asking for you to individually list all the JS tools you needed in Legacy in the Feature Request Forum
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