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[mark frost Friend mark frostJoin date: September 2014Posts: 32Downloads:0Uploads:0 Thanks: 3]

#159527

OK, I have tried my best to make Teline IV work on my website. I have worked solidly since 4 January to make it work. I have failed. Teline IV is too buggy and too slow for commercial usze, andx the support is too dreadful to trust. I really wanted this template to work as it looks so good. but it is with great regret that I have to give up on it as the promise is not delivered by the software. I have wasted three weeks of my life and cannot justify this any longer. I feel as if I have been nothing more than a free beta tester for Joomlart/J.O.O.M.

I purchased Teline IV on 4 January and have been working every single day since to make it work on my site. In the past, a template change has taken at most maybe three days. This has been three weeks and still the site is a disaster. Many of the problems were documentation issues only, but there continue to be some serious and fatal problems with the system. I have reported from the start a problem whereby the News_fp module does not display articles even though there are plenty from which it can draw — not solution. I have reported a problem where JAS Popups do not display on any page other than the home page — no solution. I have reported performance issues where it often takes several refreshes to get a page to display, and some pages will not display at all — no solution. I have given full admin access to several Joomlart developers and support people but nothing happens. I have had to redescribe the problems several times as none of the staff seem to have any understanding of english. It is clear that there is little understanding of how to run a support organisation as all they seem to do is ask me to create new tickets for the same question over and over again without solving any of the existing tickets. It also seems clear Joomlart is much more interested in developing new things before they have even fixed the existing stuff. It is frustrating to see new beta J1.6 code coming out when the existing J1.5 stuff is still so dreadfully buggy and the documentation so woeful.

If you are going to be serious about selling software, you ought to look at how it is properly done and do that. You need to ensure that the code is solid, it is well tested, and the documentation is sound. Only after all that is done should you start charging for the software. Instead, you cobble together some hacks and one or two people test it on unloaded servers or on local machines with nothing else running. What you really ought to be doing is testing on a slut machine that has every popular extension loaded and running with some simulated traffic hitting it — only then will you see what your customers see. Instead the responses tend to be “well i tried it on my home computer here and it seems to work ok….” That is not professional.

So, I would like to take you up on your offer for a full refund of the money I have spent on Teline IV and chock this experience up as a total waste of my time.

And if you are considering using this software, I would caution strongly against it. It is not stable and cannot handle any kind of real load. If you are running a news/magazine website with any real traffic, this template/system will simply collapse.

[splico123 Friend splico123Join date: January 2007Posts: 339Downloads:80Uploads:7 Thanks: 24 Thanked: 93 times in 16 posts]

#374466

Heh, strange, i have used the teline series for a while and took me less than 2 hours to set up teline IV.
All the problems i have reported have been solved within a day or two the latest by either community or the support staff. So i dont know what you are talking about.

But to be honest its not very helpfull or constructive to write suff like this without any evidence. I for one havent seen any of your posts about problems and i consider myself pretty active on most forums i visit, trying to help and learn allthe time while i am online.

So unless you provide system info, version numbers and screenshoots to back up your problems all this talk is not necessary, and is not productive at all and doesnt help the template development.

Forum community here is great, and almost any problem that surfaces is solved by them before devs even get a chance to answer.
And the staff here is multiple times more responsive and carring about customers that they do partial revrites of code for people if it is needed, and they help immensly when people get stuck.

Plus there is another point i wanted to make, before even starting a forum thread about a problem, WIKI is your friend, forum search function too is your friend since all problems are mostly relevant from other templates too. So use search function!!!

Dont badmouth something that has no reason for badmouthing

1 user says Thank You to splico123 for this useful post

1. Arvind Chauhan

[mark frost Friend mark frostJoin date: September 2014Posts: 32Downloads:0Uploads:0 Thanks: 3]

#374754

I’m sorry, but paying cash money up front for something that is so buggy is just not proper. I have provided admin access to my site to the support guys/developers, as well as some of the Phill here in the forums. I have posted four diffeten problems and a question here and got one useful answer to the question and no solutions from the other problems. The problems were converted into tickets by JA staff or forum admins. Then the devs have asked me to repeat and re describe each and every problem multiple times as they admitted they are using google translate to understand English messages. They are hoping that by resending and redescribing the prbloem over and over again eventually the translation will make enough sense to them to do something about it.
In the end they broke more things than they fixed. As for the problems, most of those that got resolved were done so by revised modules/plugins. I would report a problem — several times — and then no reply for days. Then I would go to the download page and a new version of the offending plugin or module would appear. I would download the updated bit and sometimes it would fix the problem sometimes not. But at no time did anyone bother to say please check out the updated version as it was changed to fix the problem.

I run 12 commercial websites and this is the first one i have attempted to move onto teline iv. In all our other sites a template change is a half day to two day adventure. This has been a three week nightmare. And when I ask why this template is so much slower than all our other sites, even when the live sites have serious traffic load, the response was, sorry, teline iv has many more js and db calls that normal template so it will just be slower…hope that helps…I am not kidding, that was the reply.

In the process of this I have found that it doesn’t like mootools, CB, JomSocial and Glossary very much. It can function in a pinch with one or two of these but not all. There are also plenty of undocumented glitches, particularly in News Pro when it comes to the number of category sources from which it can draw.

This post is useful in that those folks who have never used a JA template before can get some idea of what the experience of converting over a chunky website might entail. If I had known in advance I would be a paying beta tester and spending almost four weeks of solid bug fixing I would have gone elsewhere for a template. I wish someone had saved me the time by writing a post like this. I am trying to run a small business with my partner so our time is precious — we have to focus our efforts wisely.

I agree that there are plenty of answers here that make up for errors and omissions in the documentation, but it would be better if those answers were in the documentation itself. I would like to add that Aman and Phill have been very helpful indeed in answering my questions and helping me move things along — they ought to be paid by Joomlart for what they do…as I am sure others ought to be.

I guess the bottom line is that I feel it is unfair to place such a large portion of the burden of resolving issues with this product on the shoulders of unpaid community members. I also think consumers should be more aware of the condition of the code they are purchasing. If you’re frame of reference is using Joomla then your expectations of robustness can be quite high. So if that costs nothing and has a great support community, when you pay significant cash for this software and it is more buggy and the bulk of the support burden falls on the shoulders of the community, then consumers will be disappointed. I am not saying the community is incapable, I am just saying it is not a fair replacement of trained professional support staff who can respond accurately and swiftly to problems.

I’m now at the point where I dare not back out of using Teline IV as I have invested so much time into it. The only thing that could stop all this and force us to turn away from Teline IV is the performance. This site has more than 20,000 pages and handles thousands of visits per day so if the performance is poor we will have no choice but to revert and seek another template. Fingers are crossed here!
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