We’re still getting errors like “Rendering of template gallery-wp-eStore.php failed” —we do know about that one: thank you, Ed. That’s occurring on my stuff, Jane’s, and Lynn’s.
But if others of you have time today, kind of randomly prowl Closed Circle and look around; report any bugs like that to us. It was, due to having two administrators operating and implementing at the same moment, one involving a software upgrade, and the other a template/formatting adjustment, a particularly buggy event.
We’ve got the “Rendering of template gallery-wp-eStore.php failed” error fixed now (7:12 Pacific Time). The stores are again accessible.
Any other things?
I clicked the “foyer” button and the blue background at the top is so dark I can’t read the text. My computer settings? Or a problem with the site?
By the way, I absolutely hate that jingly bell at the doorway. I suppose other people think it’s great and there’s no hope for silence, short of turning off my speakers?
Jingly bell? I never put it up…at least…I don’t remember putting it up. We talked about it, but…sheesh…I’ll go zap it. sorry about that.
some say they like it. Some don’t. I think on any website, if you do anything but plain text black and white 50% will love it and 50% will hate it.
gee, we hunted for days to find that jingly bell… 🙁 and another half week to find a way to install sound with an image. But our customers rule.
I’m puzzled by the ‘dark blue’ item on clicking on the Foyer button or the big window. The background is the usual fuzzy-marbled medium green and the lettering is now in misty pale blue oblongs. Try hitting ‘refresh’ and let’s see if there’s something stuck in your cache. If not, we’ve got a weird problem. The drop-downs from the top menu are a somewhat too-dark blue, but they go to pale gold with dark lettering when you mouse over them. Are you getting that? The menu line itself is pale misty blue like the rest of the text-background.
I’m with nighthawk. That very dark blue-green background with black text (when you mouseover about, for example)is extremely difficult to read. There just isn’t enough contrast between the text and the background.
Weird! We don’t have any dark blue, unless you mean the dropdown menus… Can you tell me precisely what part of the page? The upper menu bar dropdowns? The background of the page?
It’s the background you’re using in the dropdowns. Way too dark for me to read easily.
Ok. I know where to fix that. But I’ll have to ask Jane, because if I move that selector over I could affect color throughout the site. Soon’s she’s got a spare neuron (she’s solving another graphics issue this morning) I’ll ask her. Thanks!
It ain’t that simple. The color is the same as the background. If you run the cursor over the menu options, they should have an alt BG color. I’ll look into it, but I’m pretty sure I’m right on that.
I’ve got a query in to the theme designer for why the BG transparency has gone away in IE and even some Firefox. I don’t get it. The opaque function works but it’s BLAH. Grrr….
What it’s doing…if it’s the spot in the code I found—it’s dark blue basically, but the ALT bG color is that beige, which (for me) appears as a rollover when I mouse over it. Yet Tulrose says it’s blue-green on mousing. I wonder if this isn’t another area where the upgrade wonked the CC template. I know it’s always been dark blue/beige, for me—but I wonder if the mouseover has always manifested dark green for some people or if that’s just’ since the change.
OK, I’ll yield you the jingly bell. I haven’t bought anything yet anyway, don’t have a reader and don’t like to read on the computer–get enough computer time at work–so if all the paying customers like jingly bells they should have priority. (And, as for the nonbook items, I’m a dedicated downsizer, trying to clear out a lifetime accumulation of shirts with sayings I once found charming, souvenir mugs, all that sort of thing…..hoping my children won’t make too much fun of me once it falls to them to sort out what’s left!)
I browsed the CC site and all looks fine. Everything opened for me. Bazaar opens with a click on the header. Contrast looks the same as ever, very readable. I went through all three of your pages and jumped around in the Bazaar with no problems. However, I did not try to order anything. BTW I have never had the bell jingle when I open the door. Could this be because I am on Apple? Please don’t worry about such a minor detail. 🙂 😀 😆
I’ve surfed around a bit just now and not run into any error-messages.
I like the shopdoorbelljingle (can one make a compound word like that in English?), but I’ve got to admit I’ve got my Favorites set to go directly to the Catalog page.
I hate having to say this, after Jane’s gone to such trouble to create the new look and she’s so exhausted, but I agree with the above comments about (small) black letters on a dark background.
This goes for the drop-down menus (perhaps white or pale yellow letters on the dark blue until you mouse-over, or making the blue background quite light would be better), but also for the general background.
For me, the tops of all the pages (where there’s green mixed into the sea-blue of the rest of the page) are too dark to make the black text easy to read.
In the foyer, it starts to become too dark for good reading contrast right about where it says ‘Another title on the virtual shelves’ (on a 1182×864 pixels screen). Below that, the sea-blue tint stays more or less the same, at a mid-level/mediumdark colour: it doesn’t go really light anywhere at all. On the mediumdark tint the black text is easily enough to read for me, but may still not have enough contrast for the visually impaired.
As on most pages most of the text is near the top, as well as all the menu and manouvering options, this means that most of what I’d want to read has too little contrast between background and text to make for easy reading.
It might be an artifact of my screen, but I rather think the basic colour that Jane’s morphing with the purple-and-green spiral is too dark or too saturated; amd both the purple and green aren’t light colours themselves. That makes them a good background for the pale yellow Closed Circle name, but not so good for the small black letters.
The dark green ‘Site navigation’, ‘What’s new’ and ‘Donations’ do not show up well on the dark seabluegreen background: if you want to keep this mediumdark background they’d be better in black. The heavier and larger black ‘Welcome to Closed Circle’ shows up quite well.
Perhaps making the dropdown menu type bold, and perhaps just a few points larger, would help a lot to make the top menu easily readable.
I like the Closed Circle Bazaar button, but just had a thought about it: wouldn’t it be a good idea if that would open up in a new window or as a pop-up, so people would also still be inside your store and could easily continue shopping for books, if they tried that one? But maybe too many people have pop-ups blocked – something the rest of the Wavy Navy probably has a better idea about.
It might be good to link to Cafe Press from your left sidebar ‘Closed Circle Websites’ as well.
But all this is NOT URGENT. There were NO error-messages that might have to be solved, so please take care of yourselves and only tackle what you want to, when you’re rested.
actually we have no choice about going to Cafe Press: they are what they are, and we cannot find a way to have it ‘here’ as opposed to there. So just keep using your ‘back’ button to get back to us, or have us bookmarked…
But re the colors—(and thank all of you for the specifics!) this is so weird! Our background on that entire page to my browser and to Jane’s shows about like the light blue background on this “Leave a Reply” section, on Wave; and there is no shading whatsoever: it’s all flat pale blue—while the green you say is blending into this pale blue is nearly black.
Something is not communicating!
You’re right, where the green becomes a shading into the blue it’s not really green anymore but more like a shadow, black.
The seablue backgroud on Closed Circle is clearly closely related to the colour of my post above, but om my screen it’s several degrees darker.
Like it’s slightly transparant, the same shade laid over white for this blog and over dark gray for the shop.
Translucent, not transparent? I’m no computer-artist, should leave the technical comments to others.
I just got an actual screen capture from Martha—that is nothing at all like what we see! I’ve got to get Jane on this.
Jane’s word on the sight—: “Wowwwww.” As in—that’s totally weird.
She just yelled from her room that she just tested it with Internet Explorer—(we use Mozilla Firefox)—and got the effect you’re getting. She’s going to try to fix it.
I assure you, it’s pale and pretty in Firefox!
No, it’s not. I’m running Firefox in Vista and it’s dark and saturated.
Oh, this is a good one. Stand by. I’ll tell you when we think we might have it fixed.
OK—Now.
Give it another try.
Here’s what we think happened: the way WP works, many thousands of creators do software that ‘plugs-in’ to WordPress. And WP does updates and upgrades of the main body of WP programming to keep up with technology and to keep ahead of the hackers and make things safe. Sometimes on a WP plug-in you’ll see the disclaimer “Not tested with version 4.3” or some such. This means until somebody with that version of WP reports they’re using that plug-in successfully, the creator of that plug-in can’t know there’s a problem.
Well, this time when Lynn upgraded the WP the swirly transparency in the WP Plug-in we call the Closed Circle store (a different plug-in than those we use on Wave, Face, and Captain, incidentally) stopped being as transparent as it should have been.
Wave, Face, and Captain had no adverse reaction, and as best we can figure, we’re fine since the update. But CC, using a different template, had one feature of that template go wonky…and of course since Jane and Lynn were working simultaneously, Jane on updating/simplifying our site, Lynn on implementing the scheduled upgrade…we didn’t know what might be causing it.
Thanks to the information you all have very accurately provided we now know that it’s simply the upgrade wonki-fying one template (the one CC uses) but working fine on our others.
Jane has put a patch on the problem by removing the transparency feature and making it flat blue. She has contacted the creator of the template to advise him of the problem, and he will likely fix it in fairly short order.
Meanwhile it should work fine.
Thank you all. We have the best and smartest readers in the world!
Sorry, the dropdowns are still that dark saturated heavy blue-green that black barely shows up on. And this isn’t a recent change; CC has always been very, very dark and hard to read, for me anyway. And I cleared the cache before going there to force a new download.
thanks, Tulrose. I know what you’re meaning on that one. Unfortunately, Jane says that tab is tied to some other things, so a fix on that is massive. It does read pale beige if you mouse over it.
No, mouseover on me is dark saturated blue-green.
(Vista, FireFox, Sony Vaio)
Another possibility on the colors is that the graphics-y sorts may have calibrated their monitors to show color accurately and some, like me, don’t worry about such things much and end up looking at an image rather different than the one the artist created.
That certainly does happen. A lot.
Another thought: Maybe the reason you aren’t seeing these odd artifacts is because you are viewing it from the computers on which it was implemented. WYSIWYG, but only because there are some sort of deep-rooted caches in your own computers. If you look at the sites from your local Kinko’s or coffee shop, you may get a completely different result. Just a thought, if it appears the rest of us are having a mass hallucination 🙂 BTW, I also get the dark-on-dark from my home computer (most recent version of Firefox on a Dell Vostro rigged for gaming, i.e., fancier than garden variety graphics card and more memory).
You’re right Chondrite. What they are running into is the age-old problem of supporting innumerable variations on a hardware theme. I’m running the latest Firefox but I know people who refuse to update it just because they don’t want anything to change. And Flash player now gives me errors and goes belly-up completely tieing up Firefox. I’d get rid of it completely except there’s too many sites that insist on it.
Don’t think so, cuz it changes as I change the settings on the site and always goes back to the proper transparency on both our machines which are natively win7 now with latest FF. When I bring it up in IE, I’m seeing what you all are seeing. I accept differences in the color and contrast are going to happen, but when an entire layer (the semi-transparent overlay) isn’t showing, that becomes a problem. It’s a fundamental part of this theme, so he’s got to figure out why it isn’t working.
Never knew that. Maybe we should clear the cache.
Absolutely clear the cache after every change to flush out the old pages.