JA Builder disaster and updating make it even worse

casals

Regarding to your JA Builder disaster.. This is completely incomprehensible and irresponsible from a company we’ve been a customer of for a decade. As instructed, we have upgraded JA Builder to the new version 1.1.7 so that we can edit in HTML (!) our pages that are edited before October 10th, but as a result of this upgrade, we have lost all header and module information! So the result is our pages are completely broken ..! We can't restore pages - because you destroyed all our information and you don't have even any backups.

We make a turnover of over € 10 million through this pages - that we have done with JA Builder, and now you are asking all of your JA Builder customers to redo all the pages with the newer JA Builder - which "is working fine at the moment." And we have to pay for this... Unbelievable. I think quite a few are considering making claims here.

So, explain and justify Us why we should still remain your paying customers after all this? We (as IT professionals) do not understand how you are not be able to make changes to JA Builder so that could automatically read and edit the information that is in our own databases to fit the new version - even though the original data was in your possession. Also, all this points to a fundamental (and even deliberate?) design flaw in the original version of JA Builder, where all data would be stored solely and exclusively on your servers.

casals

Update: We have been able to restore the header and module locations in part from our old backups and by slightly recoding the JA Builder template data files. But, still the biggest problem is the editing of existing pages - that can be done only by editing HTML.. Not good.

casals

And, you could also provide us a tool with which we can get the HTML of etc. from dozens or hundreds of "old" pages, etc., saved to ourselves at once, even as a basis for new JA Builder pages, so that you don't have to redo all pages manually, which is really time consuming and costly.

casals

OMG. Now when we tried to make a new page according to your instructions with your new JA Builder 1.1.7 version, but then it removed the header and footer content from all existing pages...!! So, we no longer have any menu, etc. How in the world can it be restored the all header when they are no longer visible in that HTML version of old pages ?!

casals

We were able to restore the header and footer information from an our old database backup that found the correct layout field that was copied directly to the database. But we can't even make new JA Builer pages without deleting this header and footer information - unless we then make a new page and then change the information in this database field back to old correct. This is very frustrating .. :-(

saguaros

Hi casals

Could you share the URL + super admin account of your site? I will try to create new page and see what's wrong.

casals

saguaros Sorry. For strict security reasons (law and sensitive information) we can not give to outsiders the admin permisions.

saguaros

casals

I understand but I need to have a closer look at your site so I can check for you

casals

saguaros

As we can all see, this total destruction of your JA Builder customers page data has caused really big problems for all your JA Builder customers and their operations. At the same time, it has also collapsed your technical support capacities, all of which are now going to manually restore “old” Ja Pages pages, further exacerbating the customers annoyance and dissatisfaction to your service.

If once you can manually restore the page information on customers web services, why not give us clear instructions on how we can do the job for you - because now this is not progressing well. We have found ways to restore the old header and footer data from our backups. But the biggest job is transferring all data from existing JA Builder pages to new JA Builder pages to be created. If you tell us how it is most easily handled or how you are doing it, then those of us with better technical capabilities could do that job on your behalf and get over this disaster faster.

saguaros

casals

As we explain, the data was lost so it's not possible to transfer data as you mention. If your pages have revisions, it will be easier, I will prepare a doc and share the steps to re-create it.

Regards

casals

saguaros

Hi. I think that now you may be distorting the truth a little bit; So the data you (Joomlart) had is lost, but in the clients' own database (_jabuilder_pages) you can find the pages data in html code, as well as the header/footer data (layout) - at least until you go to save again, in which case they will be lost. After that, recovery is only possible from backups or more difficult through revisions.

In other words, the easiest way would be for you to create a snippet of code now that takes advantage of this information about the pages and layout (header/footer) of the pages in the customer's database in html format and recreates the pages. I don’t understand why that would be so hard. We have done this manually and I believe you will do the same thing as long as we give you access to our sites (and database). I don’t understand why you want to make this difficult for your customers, and ruin a very long-built customer relationship (in my case, over 10 years). Or do you want us to do this work for you too?

saguaros

Hi casals

We're trying to rebuild pages on your site site from Revisions but not pages/sites have revisions. And the revisions maybe far different from the current display on frontend of a page and we must compare the page and update the same for new page. That's why we're doing it manually, believe me, the team tried to find many ways but this is best / safe for now.

And we never want to make difficult to our customers, it's accident from our system admin and we're really sorry about it, it's taking lots of time and human resources from the team too.

Hope you understand.

casals

saguaros Hi. We are new evaluating the future use of Ja Builder, now that the time has come to renew the annual license that has been in use for years.

Losing data from your servers was a really big problem. Fortunately, the data was still found on our servers, although we haven’t started manually migrating it to the new Ja Builder version because we’re afraid their pages will be completely lost.

Now the very important question; Is there any way you can restore (transfer) old data from our SQL database and Ja Builder's HTML to your databases without giving you the full access to our Joomla publishing system? That is, if we deliver the SQL information in the old Ja Builder tables to you?

And if not, how long it will take for making the changes to our existing pages.. as we cannot wait any more..

saguaros

Hi casals

As I mentioned, the only way to bring back the old pages created before Oct 2021 is rebuilding the pages. We helped to rebuild so many pages already. We need a closer look to see how your pages look like so can estimate.

Regards