CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

EDITED TO ADD: The CCRM Google Mapping function is VERY broken in IE7; in my opinion, it's unusable. It's perfect in Firefox. That does not, however, do a single thing for my constituents.

CiviCRM 1.7.9821, Drupal 5.1

We're using the Google mapping function. It's a really good start to an awesome feature! Some issues:

(Surfing as an anon user in IE7, which is how most of our constituents visit our site:)

1. Map this Address failure: Our map -- http://www.compartners.org/civicrm/profile?reset=1&gid=8&force=1&map=1
Click on a map point; visit a record. When you get to that record, click "Map this address." If you're seeing what I am seeing, the mapping fails here. WORKS IN FF BUT NOT IN IE. (Which leads me to my next point...)

2. The CiviCRM UI in IE: Custom data blocks often look like hell in IE (see contact record). Overlapping, smooshed text, etc. I know you guys develop in Safari and/or Firefox. I use Firefox, too, but most nonprofits serve people who use IE. CiviCRM is useless to people in need if its unreadable in IE. That's all I'm sayin'. And I'll continue to say it. I am not a CSS expert. I do what I can to make it better and at least useable for our constituents, but CiviCRM really needs attention in this area.

Thanks!

Johanna:

Thanx for the input. There probably is a group of people out there for whom this is an important issue. Maybe the group can mobilize and hire someone familiar with IE/CSS/Browser issues to make CiviCRM behave better in an IE world. We can definitely help in this process and roll back any needed modifications into the core

Having the entire CiviCRM team on Linux/FreeBSD/MacOSX does not help us in this regard

lobo

Yes. I find this frustrating, because you guys do amazing work and you are aiming to help non-profits and the people we serve. Not working on the UI in the most common browser on the planet (especially for low-income people in need) is--to me--shooting yourselves in the foot WRT accomplishing your goals. But perhaps you are not building this "for the people," but really for geeks. If that's the case, then be clear about it. If your goal is to help non-profits, this is one place you fall very seriously short.

Yes, I do agree that there are ways that we can get around our platform limitations and test on IE.

However it is frustrating from our side that while it is important for folks to see this running properly on IE7, they are not willing to commit resources and help us fix it. Making stuff cross browser compatible is quite important and in the past we have tested and fixed issues with IE6, and we will probably do some of this for IE7 also.

As an open source project, the basic premise is also the community helps you improve and fix things especially in areas where you lack expertise / knowledge. We'd love for the community to step up and help us out in this regard. Patches could include things like css changes we need to make to accomodate both IE / FF / Safari / Opera to recommendations on how to handle this whole issue in a more seamless manner. On our end we will definitely take a closer look at IE7 and fix a few things for the 1.8 release Thanx for the reminder

lobo

First, let me express some real empathy. Your frustration is real and exposes something that definitely needs to be worked on.

Let me propose two very specific actions you can take as a small no-resource organization to give back to the community.

• Donate an hour to testing CiviCRM in IE. Log each bug you find in the issue tracker. (see below on a quick bug tutorial)
• Take an hour and send an email out to your friends asking if they know a programmer/hacker/high school student that might be able to work on CSS and IE for you. Then point that person to the bugs you logged.

The hard part about this strategy is that it may not actually accomplish anything the first time around. However, if 50 people did this, there is a 99.9% chance that the issue would get fixed. It is a simple 2 hour contribution to the community that can have really significant impact in the long run.

Quick bug tutorial:
(1) Always test on the demo server at demo.civicrm.org. Sometimes this means you need to enter data into the demo server to reproduce your bug.
(2) Always make sure you can reproduce the bug reliably at least two times (i.e. navigate to the page and see the error twice). Bonus points if you close you browser completely before you reproduce it a second time.
(3) Get an account on the bug tracker (issues.civicrm.org).
(4) In your bug, specifically describe what behavior you observed in as much detail as possible. Provide a URL for the pages you are describing.
(5) Provide a step by step instruction for reproducing the bug. A developer will go in and if there are unclear instructions will not be able to reproduce your bug and will therefore not be able to fix it.
(6) Describe how you were expecting things to work/ how you think they should work.
(7) Don't be frustrated if your issue is put off into the future or doesn't get fixed immediately.

I had similar issues using google's mapping with IE7, so I just switched to the yahoo mapping option instead which works fine in IE7 and firefox. It's not all that bad, even better then google mapping in some aspects in my opinion.

I've filed a bug fix for the specific IE 7 issue reported by Johanna on this thread.

Johanna - if you can confirm the exact URL/path where you're seeing the problem and describe the display problem a bit, that will potentially help. Add your notes to the issue here:
http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-2087

Also, I tried to navigate to the problem page as you described and I get Access Denied at the point where I try to access the "contact" record. Can you provide us with a login - so we can see the current behavior on your site once we get IE 7 running over here.

NOTE: We've filed the issue for 1.8 - but the fix will hopefully be either in the CSS file or the template - and so should be quite easy to backport.

Please post an issue to Jira with specifics for any of the other high-priority IE 7 issues and we'll see if we can make progress on them as well.

Hi Johnna

The fixes for Google Map / IE7 issue has been committed to 1.8 branch (r 10338)
You can view the changes here : http://fisheye.civicrm.org/changelog/CiviCRM/branches/v1.8?cs=10388

OR if you will want to do it yourself then :

step 1) open file civicrm/templates/CRM/Contact/Form/Task/Map/Google.tpl in any text-editor
step 2) goto line no 7
           There you will find code like : var map     = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map"));
           Replace it with                  : var map     = new GMap2(document.getElementById("google_map"));
step 3) goto line no 68
           There you will find code like : <div id="map" style="width: 600px; height: 400px"></div>
           Replace it with                  : <div id="google_map" style="width: 600px; height: 400px"></div>

Save the changes, close the file and reload the browser..

Let us know if you have more UI related issues

Thanks
Manish