Internet Explorer
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I first downloaded Concrete5 about two weeks ago, and have been learning the ins and outs of this amazing CMS. I've also picked myself up a copy of concrete5 Beginner's Guide from Packt Publishing to accelerate the learning process (great book).
By this point I've gotten a fairly good grip on the CMS and have had no troubles creating themes and working with concrete (except for a couple bugs I found and posted).
I am the "webmaster" (hate that title, lol) for our company which employs around 1,100 people. Like many other companies, our primary browser here is Internet Explorer 7 and I have no control over this. I don't use it (love Firefox and Chrome), but I do have 4 virtual machines set up with IE 6 through to IE 9 to test with. Because we will have many people editing our website, I can't force them to not use IE when using the CMS.
My primary concern with Concrete5 is support for Internet Explorer. I like many other developers HATE having to support it, but it's something we have to do to create efficient websites that work well for everyone. Some may be lucky enough and can develop only for certain other, standards compliant browsers, however it's few and far between I believe.
Are there any plans to improve support for this browser? Working with Concrete5 in IE is not much fun, and not just in the old IE versions. Even IE 9 doesn't seem to like Concrete5 and vice-versa. Some things I've noticed that don't work or are very finicky in IE are:
- The site map is quite visually messed up in all IE versions
- The intelligent search does not work at all in any IE version
- Editing a content block, saving it and trying to edit that block again in IE will not work at all
- The fading visual effects between dialogs, etc. make text rendering pretty horrid in IE (so why not disable these if using IE?)
I've noticed quite a few threads posting about IE issues as well with Concrete5. So, my primary concern is, will this support improve for this horrid browser that nobody should use, or is it only going to get worse (or to rephrase, will this browser eventually get dropped as one of the officially supported browsers)?
Other than that, LOVE the CMS guys, great work. Works beautifully in everything but IE.
P.S. I haven't yet went through all the admin options with IE, but the time will come. Hoping to not find anymore "surprises" :)
By this point I've gotten a fairly good grip on the CMS and have had no troubles creating themes and working with concrete (except for a couple bugs I found and posted).
I am the "webmaster" (hate that title, lol) for our company which employs around 1,100 people. Like many other companies, our primary browser here is Internet Explorer 7 and I have no control over this. I don't use it (love Firefox and Chrome), but I do have 4 virtual machines set up with IE 6 through to IE 9 to test with. Because we will have many people editing our website, I can't force them to not use IE when using the CMS.
My primary concern with Concrete5 is support for Internet Explorer. I like many other developers HATE having to support it, but it's something we have to do to create efficient websites that work well for everyone. Some may be lucky enough and can develop only for certain other, standards compliant browsers, however it's few and far between I believe.
Are there any plans to improve support for this browser? Working with Concrete5 in IE is not much fun, and not just in the old IE versions. Even IE 9 doesn't seem to like Concrete5 and vice-versa. Some things I've noticed that don't work or are very finicky in IE are:
- The site map is quite visually messed up in all IE versions
- The intelligent search does not work at all in any IE version
- Editing a content block, saving it and trying to edit that block again in IE will not work at all
- The fading visual effects between dialogs, etc. make text rendering pretty horrid in IE (so why not disable these if using IE?)
I've noticed quite a few threads posting about IE issues as well with Concrete5. So, my primary concern is, will this support improve for this horrid browser that nobody should use, or is it only going to get worse (or to rephrase, will this browser eventually get dropped as one of the officially supported browsers)?
Other than that, LOVE the CMS guys, great work. Works beautifully in everything but IE.
P.S. I haven't yet went through all the admin options with IE, but the time will come. Hoping to not find anymore "surprises" :)
It sounds like you are working in an enterprisey environment.
Something that might help the troubleshooting would be to get in touch with your Network Administrator/IT Department and ask if you could get a list of Active Directory/Group Policy settings for IE. There are several common "hardening" ones that deal directly with Javascript/AJAX stuff. I'm not saying that is the cause, but it may be helpful for future development if that information was available.
Something that might help the troubleshooting would be to get in touch with your Network Administrator/IT Department and ask if you could get a list of Active Directory/Group Policy settings for IE. There are several common "hardening" ones that deal directly with Javascript/AJAX stuff. I'm not saying that is the cause, but it may be helpful for future development if that information was available.
Well, I definitely feel retarded now, and thank you guys for the prompt reply. After looking at your test site in IE, things seem to be looking right (except the Intelligent Search error). What looks like it's happening is IE is for some reason rendering these pages in compatibility mode. So, the sitemap is only messed up in IE 7. IE 8 and IE 9 must be rendering in compatibility mode. I couldn't tell because the button to switch doesn't show up at all like it's being forced. I don't think it's a group policy however because the virtual machines are not connected to AD. Maybe it's IE's idea of taking a best guess at rendering a website? God I hate this browser.
Btw, I wouldn't expect Concrete5 to support IE 6 but at minimum IE 7 (which it does :)).
I'm going to keep looking into this compatibility mode issue, I know there's a meta tag you can supply to force IE to use the latest rendering engine. Going to try this and see if it improves things. :)
I'm wondering if the "locked" tinymce issue is related to this compatibility mode too, will report back after I give this stuff a shot!
Thanks guys,
Jordan
Btw, I wouldn't expect Concrete5 to support IE 6 but at minimum IE 7 (which it does :)).
I'm going to keep looking into this compatibility mode issue, I know there's a meta tag you can supply to force IE to use the latest rendering engine. Going to try this and see if it improves things. :)
I'm wondering if the "locked" tinymce issue is related to this compatibility mode too, will report back after I give this stuff a shot!
Thanks guys,
Jordan
Looks like that was problem. Apparently, IE by default renders intranet pages in compatibility mode which was making this a huge pain in the ass to work with. I tried adding the meta tag to stop it from doing that but it didn't work. A little googling took me tohttp://stackoverflow.com/questions/2518256/override-intranet-compat... , you can add a response header on the server to tell IE to quit doing this dumb sh**. Thanks again guys and I hope this helps somebody else.
P.S. IE must die.
P.S. IE must die.
It wouldn't shock me at all if we had missed things in ie7 and ie8.
Even cross browser testing with these things is a tedious nightmare,
so the more detailed bug reports the better.
thanks!
best wishes
Franz Maruna
CEO - concrete5.org
http://about.me/frz
Even cross browser testing with these things is a tedious nightmare,
so the more detailed bug reports the better.
thanks!
best wishes
Franz Maruna
CEO - concrete5.org
http://about.me/frz
Something sounds seriously off with your install. I just setup a test
site and checked everything you listed in ie9 and it all works fine.
http://ietest.c5host.com (admin pw : ietest)
Intelligent search works fine, though the cropping/line height on the
text entry field is a little odd.
The site map looks and works perfectly.
I put the main content block in edit mode, made changes, published and
repeated a few times - worked great.
Using IE8 the only bug I was able to recreate was the intelligent
search - you're right something seems off with the javascript.
I don't have IE7 in-front of me.
So.. some thoughts:
1) Are you using ie6 or something? I see you mention it and I can tell
you yes, we will never support that. ;)
2) Are you sure something isn't off with your install? Try on the demo
I made on our instant setups and see if you get the same result. Could
it be there's some plugin your IE browsers all have that is colliding
with concrete5? We see that with firefox sometimes.
3) If you really can catch things off in older IE flavors we do
support (7+) please do submit them as bugs in our bug tracker under
the Developers tab. That lets other people confirm the bug, it helps
us determine if it's a core issue or an install issue, etc.
Referencing "I see other threads about this kinda stuff" doesn't help
at all because 9 times out of 10 threads aren't at all related. EG:
searching for IE issues might find you forum threads, but often its
someone cutting and pasting out of word into TinyMCE which leaves the
horrid MSO tags everywhere. So at a high level "woah ie issues
everywhere!" but in detail, no not really. It's also very hard in the
forums to know what version someone is talking about, or what's up
with their environment. Using the bug tracker really helps us keep
these conversations granular so we can solve them.
4) Yes, while it is certainly no one's favorite browser around our
office, it is something we do eventually test on and expect to work
acceptably (past version 6 - even microsoft doesn't support THAT).
best wishes
Franz Maruna
CEO - concrete5.org
http://about.me/frz