Popup system - major change

The popup message system on the library makes use of something called the 'alert' function that is provided by javascript (a programming language which is used by web browsers). Originally, all the different browsers provided a fairly similar implementation of this 'alert' but more recently they are all tending to do things differently. This makes life very difficult as you have no control of the actual appearance of the popup window that displays the message.

I've been putting it off for about 2 years but have now finally bitten the bullet and rewritten a large part of the popup message software such that the popups now work independently of the javascript 'alert' function.

In order to try and test the new system I've had to run both the old and new systems in parallel which has further complicated things. And in addition in order to make the popups work as I wanted I've had to install a major upgrade to some software which is used for a number of other things on the site including story viewing, library card viewing, fault reporting and a few other minor features.

The reason I mention all the above is because as I try and switch everyone over to the new software there may well be some problems experienced, especially if web browsers hold on to old versions of the site in their cache. Anyway, if anyone does experience problems do let us know and we'll see what we can do to sort it out.

The popup messages themselves should now appear with a set of 6 menu buttons and hopefully the rest of the site temporary 'greyed' out. The menu buttons are:

Delete: closes the popup message and deletes it
Delete & Reply: deletes the popup but also brings up the response box so you can reply to it.

Store: closes the popup message and places it in your message Store (so it doesn't get culled)
Store & Reply: stores the popup but also brings up the response box so you can reply to it.

Reply: just brings up the response box so you can reply to it.
Close: simply closes the popup message window.


As far as we can determine it works in Firefox, Chrome, Opera, IE6, IE7 and IE8 .. although of course as per usual it had to be virtually rewritten to work in the bug-ridden IE6 and IE7 browsers.

I have checked everything in both Chrome and Firefox browsers Feb's and it works just fine, thank s for all you hard work once again, the improvements you have made recently have been outstanding, making so many things much easier to operate.
Thanks Again Keffy

The Validation Error Report has a problem; it works for some stories but not for others. The dialog box pops up but I can't type anything in it.

The printing also works on some stories but not on others. Before I could just hit CTL+P in the story and it would print out. Now on half the stories all that will print is the first 2 Library pages instead of the story. For example, in the Latest section "Headmaster's Alternative" will print out fine but "The Three Annies" won't and I have tried both several times.

I am using IE8.

I can't reproduce this .. can you let me have some specifics .. i.e. which stories and from which listing (search screen, latest loaded, author page etc).



The site has never supported or encouraged printing so I can't help with that.

I like the "new" flags. They catch the eye.

Goodgulf

Februs I did not know we allowed swearing on the site.

They should show up on the author pages (Latest loaded) for stories submitted within the last 30 days ... thought it was worth differentiating them from stories which, although part of the latest loaded list for an author, were not submitted recently.

My views on the Internet Explorer (dysfunctional) family of web browsers is well known, I'm sure everyone is sick of hearing them by now...

I also hear that M$ are up to their old tricks again and have announced that IE10 won't be supported on Vista .. personally I think that's good news as it may persuade yet more people to abandon IE in favour of the far superior Firefox and Chrome browsers.

I want to praise your hard work. I only joined the site relatively recently and it's clear you put a great deal of effort toward maintaining and improving it. The "new" tags are especially fabulous. Thank you!

I found a quirk. When I hit store and reply, it gives me a pop up to reply, and that works well as far as I can tell, but it doesn't store the original message, only my reply.