They have a system called ImageCafé, which allows you some neat tools to organize web site page layout, create menus, and so on.
Only...
- You have no users/groups, so you cannot share content editing authority with others.
- You have to publish the entire web site, meaning that you cannot scale your site easily.
- You only have three “versions” of your ENTIRE SITE. If you want to roll back before those three versions, SOL.
- You have to commit EVERYTHING on the site. Which means that if any files got onto your site through other means in the /htdocs directory, it blows them away. FTP directories and file uploads? BLAMMO! Install Joomla? BLAMMO!
- Network Solutions has no idea how to migrate users from ImageCafé to Joomla.
- If you begin to transfer to Joomla, you CANNOT MAKE ANY CHANGES TO IMAGECAFÉ, or ALL OF JOOMLA IS DESTROYED.
- Most people at Network Solutions Customer Service can’t even spell Joomla, never mind tell you why you want to install it.
- Most of the people who do know what Joomla is are not really sympathetic to the fact that they have you over a barrel.
This problem has been outstanding with no suitable resolution from Network Solutions. No migration path to Joomla. They didn’t even realize ImageCafé was doing this until I told them. At first they blamed me for doing something wrong. Then I repeatedly uploaded the file, changed something using ImageCafé, and lo! The files and subdirectories not put on the website by FTP were missing. Lovely.
The last time I tried to tackle this issue, we basically changed the Unix filesystem read, write, execute (rwx) permissions on the file, so that, theoretically, ImageCafé should not be blowing away the files or folders.
No dice. It blew them away still.
So for months, I have been wrestling with simply getting my web site to STOP doing this data-destructive behavior. Network Solutions has been a big network problem. It’s frustrating, embarrassing, and makes future business impossible and unstable.
Plus, even if I could get these files nailed up for now, I still need to open content management to other people. The organization needs to scale, and ImageCafé does not have any user-to-content level security. At all.
What sucks is that by going to Joomla, I’ll be losing the rather nifty ImageCafé page layout tools. Oh well. I’d rather make .css a bit more confusing rather than seeing my data get blown away over and over and over again.
The kind of people I usually talk to about this problem are Level 2 techs. First level phone techs are, for all intents, useless wastes of time other than people to type in a raw description of how things are broken. They have no practical experience with Joomla. Though they know it is available.
The Level 1 Techs pass me up to their supervisors. They also turn out, generally, to be not-so-hot. But usually after about 20 minutes to an hour of my time mostly wasted repeating the same problem as I have had since September, I get to talk to a Level 2 tech. About 50% of the time. Who is a person who generally understands my problem and utterly realizes that Network Solutions is simply Network ¬Solution (Nul- or Empty-of-Solutions). Or, more poetically, they are the Network Problem in the first place.
ImageCafé can be salvaged. It could be re-written to work with Joomla users/groups. It could be made a module of Joomla and/or Drupal. But as a Content Management System, it suxxors the hard rocks.
Three revisions... of the entire site? (wtf?) I’m used to making hundreds of changes on an individual WIKIPEDIA file. And then, if you have to recover? You might need to go back a dozen or two dozen revisions. Not only three. And this is just for ONE file.
So ImageCafé blows hard. And Joomla?
Joomla is interesting. But they won’t let you install it at the /htdocs root level. So... Um... Why not?
They say that it needs to go down at a lower level for some sort of “running as an application” reason. I am not sure they were very smart in their wrapping of it, and thus toss it under /htdocs/[something]/. You cannot have it be just /htdocs/. Which is annoying. It means that anything under /htdocs CANNOT go under a CMS.
Except for ImageCafé. Catch-22.
I have tried before to get Joomla up and running. About 12 times so far. Yet each time I get somewhat there, I’ve done things like, oh, touched a page through ImageCafé. It took me a few times before I realized that ImageCafé was what destroyed the entire Joomla directory. “wtf? Didn’t I do some Joomla work? Grrr... Alright... let’s start over.”
Once I realized what it was doing... I realized I was NEVER going to be able to use ImageCafé EVER, EVER, EVER again. If I even do so much as breathe hard on it, it will utterly overwrite and destroy everything in Joomla. An unrecoverable error.
I really cannot believe that Network Solutions, those brilliant people, are so idiotic as to think that ImageCafé is the end-all-and-be-all of a small business “solution.”
In fact, they aren’t. They are hard at work recoding some portions of ImageCafé based on negative feedback. I won’t say what I’ve heard so far, but it should be good when it is released.
However, again, ImageCafé is dead for me. It has to be dead. I cannot, ever, never, ever touch it. To do so will destroy — literally — everything I will do in Joomla.
So I cannot update the old site. I have to check in, manually, everything I already have done into Joomla before I can relaunch the site... which will only get me back to where I already am today.
Then, finally, I will be able to continue doing more work.
What a bizarre, stomach-churning, dead-endian “solution” this turned out to be. I got the site in August. I’ve had these problems since September. October. November. Now December. How long must this madness continue? I guess until I get my entire site manually “hupped” over to Joomla. A process I will have to invent myself since Network Solutions never came up with any scripts, process or methodology for change management from ImageCafé, their one web site management offering, to Joomla, their new offering.
What experiences have you had with Web “solutions” which put you over a barrel, or put your nerves over the edge? Or put your business into the red? Or bankruptcy?
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