27 replies to this topic

[Maxxius]

Hi, gonna go ranting here but for a good reason.

First it was a couple of things but as time goes by more thing need changing and I cannot get THE OFFICIAL IPS SUPPORT to support me saying that Nexus is encoded. it is getting ridiculous.

There are bugs, there are changes I want done in MY nexus that I PAID for and I can't. Not by myself (that's fine), but even when IPS support staff (which are official employees at IPS! how cool is that) cannot help me with stuff I really start to question how things work internally in IPS.

It looks like only a small group of developers have actual access to unencoded Nexus and they hide it under a rock as it was a damn holy grail even from their own companies' support staff. These are not hi-tech UFO blueprints or whatever why hide it so much. Or lets say okay, hide it from your employees but allow them to go to devs tell them that this and that needs to be done in that and that file so devs could fix stuff, encode it again and give it to the support so they could give it to me. It can take more time to be done that would be fine. IPS support staff lets say could visit nexus devs once a week to get fixes done and files encoded.

How would you feel that you paid for software and even simple things cannot be changed and the company you bought it from tells you to they can't do jack for you?

I love you IPS but this encoding and no-support nonsense is something you need to work out pretty soon.

end of rant.

Would love to hear what IPS representatives have to say about this one.

[Michael]

They do give you support, on the product as it is designed to work. Any modification to the source you want to do is, and always has been, up to you. That's never been an issue before products like this have been encoded, but it doesn't change the fact that IPS is giving you the same level of support with this product as they give with any others.

Rather than look for ways to modify Nexus, which you can't since it's encoded, can you try to give feedback to IPS on what they could do to let you do things like write hooks to achieve what you want to do with your install?

[Maxxius]

not everything is as beautiful as it sounds Michael, here are two of latest examples:

Ticket #1

I put am add to board index and it has unnecessary padding from the top. I want to remove padding-top and leave left/right/bottom padding as it is. problem is I just cant seem to find where the styling is located for that item. firebug gives no leads. please help.

Answer #1

Hello, Unfortunately that value is hardcoded in the current version of IP.Nexus but a CSS class has been added for the next version so it can be customised. Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.

End result - I'm stuck with unnecessary padding for nexus banners. especially in header NOT NICE. Easily fixable with a single and simple file edit. NOT happening. And I'm not gonna go for first wave releases of IPB 3.2 & nexus to be a test guinea pig. So that being said I gonna wait for A LONG TIME to switch to 3.2 meaning I not gonna have this fixed.

Ticket #2

You have any tips to disable or redirect the duplicate content so to say

because both urls

website.com/forum/index.php?app=nexus&module=payments&section=store and
website.lt/forum/shop

go to the same place.

Answer #2

Hello,

Do you have ACP->System Settings->Search Engine Optimization->Incorrect Permalink Handling set to Redirect to the new URL?

But.. I just checked, and that does not work.

Nexus apparently isn't setup to handle the incorrect permalink handling.. And, for consistency, it probably should. I put a bug report in on that.. But.. Those files are encoded, so we can't change them. I tried a few things with the furlTemplate, but.. Didn't seem to work for me.

Stuck again. Nothing can be done. No fix. Wait many months till 3.2. series is pretty much very stable. Nice....

---

Simple things that CAN be fixed if IPS would have been a little bit more flexible.

[IPBSupport.de]

I honestly do not know where the problem is.

You get support and your examples have nothing to do with the encoding of IP.Nexus. There are (open) Bug Reports and the Bugs are fixed with the next Release of IP.Nexus.

As these "bugs" are not critical and not effect the usability of your community, i see no need for the support to fix the "bugs" immediately.

[Francismori7_2]

The problem is that the things could've been fixed a lot faster by a peer if it wasn't encoded. It could've been far more easier to get support from other customers, and the way Nexus is done makes it dumb to buy. People can't buy a software that doesn't deal with half of their needs and "wait for the next release". Simple stuff could be added by myself if Nexus wouldn't be encoded. That's my 2 cents.

[Lindy]

While I appreciate your frustration, Nexus is different than our other products in that it handles money. You really don't want your peers hacking away at something that is dealing with other people's data and we don't recommend that you do either. Encoded software is not all that unusual. I/we use several pieces of encoded software internally - it can be frustrating, but that is the nature of the beast, unfortunately.

Our Client Service Agents/technicians are not developers and code edits are not part of our standard support offerings - I do sincerely apologize if that was not made clear. You can, however, always request that your issue be escalated.

With all of that said, we're always open to suggestions and I'll certainly look into the possibility of fixes making their way to clients via support a bit quicker.

Thank you for your feedback and again, I'm sorry for your frustration.

[Maxxius]

Thanks for taking time to respond.

[.time]

Most money-handling applications are encoded, WHMCS to name one. Fixing the padding at the top of the banner shouldn't be too difficult... what if you put a blank div above it and gave it a negative bottom margin?

[CessPoolCleaner]

While I appreciate your frustration,

Whilst I can understand the official policy with encoding, I don't agree.

Leaving that aside as a possible lost argument. The problem I have had and still have is that the API-hooks-whatever are not documented well enough to simply use them. Most of the sample code is simply an empty class definition nothing showing any useful infomration, especially when the data being passed need to be derived form other calls to the internal code.

Like,

  $customer = customer::load( $invoice->member );

to access the customer information in an action script, support saying that they are not there to support custom development is fine, if the api's are documented properly. It took almost a week of whining to get that line of code from support. At one point I had got at the data by using some php hacking, all wasted time.

If you encode the stuff, the API's used to perform actions need to be properly documented!

Thanks,
Larry

[redg8r]

People can't buy a software that doesn't deal with half of their needs and "wait for the next release". Simple stuff could be added by myself if Nexus wouldn't be encoded.

Have to agree, my frustration is that Nexus seems to be modeled towards IPS needs first. Cpanel integration, paid download files, ticket systems etc, are nice additional features, but general functionality, such as weight based shipping and in-depth physical product options/attributes should have been implemented first.

Currently, Nexus is fantastic for clients who sell digital content (like IPS themselves) but as a general eCommerce application it's seriously lacking even the basics.

I'm currently only selling advertisements with it, and it fails miserably at that. every upgrade breaks the advertisement rotation and even basic statistics such as hits perX, clicks perX is not available to our advertisers. I wrote a hook for that once (before nexus was encoded) but it broke after Alpha stage and have no way to research a fix because like was said before API documentation is seriously lacking sitewide.

I hope they soon reconsider, as I'll likely drop the product. I find it curious that IPSubscriptions (also dealing with $$) was never encoded.

[.Ian]

Most money-handling applications are encoded, WHMCS to name one. Fixing the padding at the top of the banner shouldn't be too difficult... what if you put a blank div above it and gave it a negative bottom margin?

Actually that is not totally true - yes it is encoded, but only on files that they consider to be essential and more often than not this is to prevent others from stealing the code etc.

In reality very few nexus or indeed WHMCS store data as they are often used with external financial bodies so they control the sensitive financial data.

So with WHMCS there are many files that can be edited and those that are encoded will often be supplied where possible in an unencoded state where possible on request. It would be nice of Nexus could also only encode where essential, rather than encode all files.

The padding was going to be sorted out 2 or 3 versions ago according the tracker, but I do not believe this ever happened. We had to bodge the code for the page - not ideal, but it works fine I know I had a ticket from January and had the same response. Of course when they do 'fix' it, we will need to amend our code.

[redg8r]

yes it is encoded, but only on files that they consider to be essential and more often than not this is to prevent others from stealing the code etc.

It's my opinion that this is the primary reason the product was encoded to begin with, which is fine, but just admit it and improve documentation so we can work around it.

[.Ian]

It's my opinion that this is the primary reason the product was encoded to begin with, which is fine, but just admit it and improve documentation so we can work around it.

Can't comment on IPS, but that is the case for WHMCS as far as I know.

IPS have their own reasons and that is their right at the end of the day.

[AlexJ]

One Q:

If someone hacks my forum then the data will be secured if I used encoded version? I always thought data is in database and if forums are hacked, data will be gone too? So what is the point of keeping encoded files?

Sorry, I am not genius when it come down to php or webcoding. So please feel free to educated me and tell me in technical terms how encoded files will save the data of my customers.

Thank you.

[Mark]

Have to agree, my frustration is that Nexus seems to be modeled towards IPS needs first. Cpanel integration, paid download files, ticket systems etc, are nice additional features, but general functionality, such as weight based shipping and in-depth physical product options/attributes should have been implemented first.

I'm currently only selling advertisements with it, and it fails miserably at that. every upgrade breaks the advertisement rotation and even basic statistics such as hits perX, clicks perX is not available to our advertisers. I wrote a hook for that once (before nexus was encoded) but it broke after Alpha stage and have no way to research a fix because like was said before API documentation is seriously lacking sitewide.

All the features you mention (weight-based shipping, product options and displaying clicks/hits to advertisers) are supported. I'd recommend contacting support if you require assistance with these features

[redg8r]

I'd recommend contacting support if you require assistance with these features

Weight based shipping quotes from USPS, Fedex, and UPS are not yet a feature. Agreed, there is a weight based option, but it's not what it seems and won't compete with a real-time shipping calculation. Almost every reputable cart script ties into the three shipping API's listed above.
I worked with these API's 8 years ago, but I cant with Nexus, of course because its encoded.

I might open a ticket with support regarding product options, because I don't currently see Nexus handling 2 tiered options, for example, keeping accurate inventory of a red/blue/green t-shirt in size small/med/large, in one "package" are you saying that this is possible? Cause the way I see it you have to currently list the same shirt a minimum of 3 times (3 packages, maybe 9) to achieve proper inventory count.

As for Advertisement statistics, yes Nexus keeps one global stat, what about filtering those stats, by month, day, week? I charge my clients by the month, they would like to know how well their campaign performs in a set period of time.

Regardless, this is getting off topic, my complaint was that the software is well tailored for digital product, but lacks for tangible product. The thread was an effort to explain that some users could workaround these deficiencies if the code was opened up, but with it encoded, were at the mercy and direction of the developer, which seems to lean towards digital services.

Whats been done with IPDownloads and marketplace is fantastic (Thank you Mark), if the same effort could be put towards tangible product, Nexus would be a stellar success.

[Mark]

Product options (i.e. different prices and stock levels for different variations of a product) is indeed possible, yes. See my blog entry on it.


We try to keep an even focus on digital and tangible - indeed, our research into IP.Nexus users shows approximately a 50/50 split.
With IP.Nexus 1.2, we introduced a lot of features related to digital sales (license keys, WHM integration, custom packages, etc.) Once we have the 3.2 update out of the way, I'd like to turn attention to some features related to physical sales - of which integration with shipping companies is top of my list.

Of course, the fact the product is encoded doesn't stop you modifying it - IP.Board features a powerful hook system you can use to override any class.
The method which calculates shipping is public_nexus_payments_pay::addShipping() - the method which displays the form is public_nexus_payments_pay::selectShipping().

[Luis Manson]

im getting crazy coding a gateway and i can not see how the other ones work nor see some files and functions to understand the (VERY basic doc).... i have posted on support forums and im still waiting an answer for very basic stuff

[CessPoolCleaner]

Of course, the fact the product is encoded doesn't stop you modifying it - IP.Board features a powerful hook system you can use to override any class.
The method which calculates shipping is public_nexus_payments_pay::addShipping() - the method which displays the form is public_nexus_payments_pay::selectShipping().

Excellent but where is it all documented?

As in my post a while ago how are we supposed to work out how to do anything when everything is hidden? I don't mind it being encoded, too much, so long as we can get the information we need to do stuff I am used to the old IBM days when things were done by what they called 'exits' (this is assembler era) every exit was documented and an example provided .. you didn't need the source to do development, if you are going to encode stuff the coding hooks, function overloading and data access methods need to be clearly documented and sample code provided.

[Mark]

Areas where Nexus can be extended are documented here:
http://community.inv...ources/ipnexus/

We don't release the PHPDoc files for IP.Nexus... although, you can find out the name of any method and the parameters it takes very easily using reflection.