TOPIC: 12 Hour view in Calendar not showing.

Yves,
I had/have patience when someone is trying to make things right, my clients did not. I could not explain to them how a simple calendar could not post a dated event on the right day and could not display the right time. I had no explanation nor offered any excuses. What I don't have patience for is expecting a complete and functioning product only to find out it is not those things. When you pay for something, there is an expectation that you are actually getting what you paid for.

Either way, I have a working calendar now that is tested and actually Fixed, not patched. It works with all time zones, all hours of the day, and even handles day light savings time as it should. These were all issues with the original code that have now been fixed.

So you would not be interested in the rewrite then? I guess I will leave this post here to let others know that I have a fix for the old mootools calendar plugin for CompoJoom Matuko.

Hey Chris,
Yves and I, we are sorry for the way things went. It's our fault that we couldn't provide you with the support you expect.
I understand how frustrating it can be to talk to a customer and not to have an explanation for an issue.

However you have to agree with us that each bug should be categories into priority. Bugs with high priority = bugs that prevent you from the normal usage of the component should be addressed immediately and such with low priority - can wait.
12h format is one of those bugs with low priority. Why? Because the 24h format was working. And every single person on this world can understand a time written with 15:00. I'm sure that your customer could also accept a 24h view for a few months till the new version of the software is released.

It's our fault for not communicating clearly enough that it will take some time to fix this properly and not just patch the code. There was no point in spending half a day to patch the 12h view of the calendar, because it is all being rewritten to use different library.

Keeping in mind, that this was a low priority bug and that you still use the software - I'm unwilling to give you a refund for it. What I'm willing to do on the other hand is to extend your subscription with 3 months as a compensation for the lost time with this issue. I hope that we can bury the hatchet and concentrate on what is important... and that is improving the software.

Kind regards,
Daniel

Daniel,

I appreciate the reply. You were right in saying that it was not communicated that a complete rewrite was in the works. I had no idea, there was no effort made to explain this. What I did hear for a month was "I did not forget you", and "Sorry, I was on vacation". Let me help clarify some of the concerns that you are over looking as well as some that I haven't even addressed in this thread yet. You may or may not want to look at some of these "bugs" before your next release.

1. The calendar is a major user interface that we have found most users would rather use instead of looking at a list of events. They want to see the events visually on a calendar so they can organize their time better. Being able to present those events in an organized matter should be a development priority if it is being released to have such features.
2. 12 hour formatting is the "normal" in the US. The general populous only work in 12 hour formats. "Every single person on this world" cannot understand a time written in 24 hour, and would be a gross oversight to assume such a thing.
3. The display category filter when creating a Calendar module does not work. All categories will be displayed regardless of what category ID's are being populated in the catid array stored in the category table.
4. The tips hover call out is anything but stellar. I would consider showing different info like short description and fees for example instead of the exact same info that is already being displayed on the calendar. In an effort to making this a better product, I would consider this a wishlist item and certainly not a high priority item.
5. The day we made the site live for the client we discovered several items with the payment API that were broke or was functioning with poor decision making in mind. For example, the authorizenet plugin did not work. It would not accept payments. You can imagine my embarrassment when the client couldn't even book an event and take payments. I consider this a high priority! problem.
6. Some thought on process flow, you might consider a couple other things. IF it is a paid event that requires payment upfront, I would not allow a spot to be filled and booked until the payment is confirmed and accepted by the gateway as a complete transaction. Furthermore, if a transaction is declined, you need to build in better error handling to manage these situations so declined transactions are not taking up valuable seating in the booking event nor misleading customers into thinking they have booked for the event.
7. Along those same thoughts, a booking confirmation should NOT be sent out UNTIL you have payment confirmation. If this is a paid event, why would any respected business want to give confirmation without proper payment processes? How would you explain to a customer that they still need to pay even though they have a payment and booking confirmation email in their hands, an email that you sent to them! This is just bad business practice and will create more enemies that valued customers.
8. Once the payment API was addressed, it still would not mark the event as paid. Another design flaw. I would also consider this as a high priority issue.
9. There was no booking ID being passed to the payment gateway. How do you expect the client to account for payments and provide proper book keeping for their finances of their business? This functionality becomes even more important when your software does not properly receive the payment gateways successful transaction reply to mark the event as paid.

I tell you all these things because I think your software has great potential but also has some major shortcomings to being a useful Event extension for commercial applications. We have over 80 hours in debugging and code rewrites and have addressed and fixed all the issues stated above. I had to hire programmers to fix your product because of deadlines I had to meet providing a working solution on time. I did not have the luxury to wait for a complete software rewrite. I can honestly tell you two things. 1.) Had I known there were so many "bugs" whether you consider them minor or not, I would have never endorsed your product on my clients site. 2.) Now that I have both my own time invested and the time and money invested from other programmers to fix your product, I will continue using it until it has lost it's usefulness.

So yes, I am asking for my subscription to be refunded back to reduce total investment in the product by a mere 15% of total costs.

Respectfully yours,
Chris

Dear Chris,
As you can read on our license page down at the bottom all our extensions are released under the GPL license version 2. Quote from this page www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
(The caps lock is in the original text.)

NO WARRANTY

11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.

12. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

Note: Free means - freedom and not free as in a "free beer".

I'm really sorry that you had additional cost involved with the software, but as the license states - we are not liable for this. The software is distributed as is in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. (caps lock is again from the GNU license version 2)

You might have invested over 80h in the software, but we've invested over 4000h... At the same time we distribute the software for a fraction of our development cost so far. And I'm more or less sure that you didn't charge your customer 59€ for developing the event system...

To me the whole story looks like this: You buy a car, drive it for a while and find out that the radio display in the car doesn't work properly. You fix it, then go back to the dealer and ask him for refund, because the display was not working. You don't want to return the car, you want to continue to drive it, but the dealer has to refund you the full amount of the car price. No matter that the driving wheel works, the brakes work and everything else that helps you bring you from point A to point B works.

You might not like the workflow, but the workflow is as is. Every software has a workflow. If you don't like it, you don't use the software.

With all this said - it should be clear that I don't agree with you. I find it unfair that you continue on using our software, but then request a full refund... Despite that I'm going to give you the refund, because we want our clients to be satisfied.

Kind regards,
Daniel

P.S. I really value your feedback! We are continuously working on improving our software.

P.P.S. You can see the new calendar in 3.1 over here www.facebook.com/compojoom/posts/552034064911970?stream_ref=5