Text on our Customer Portal looks like it has been reset

[Hiten]

Hi Hornbill Team, 

Bit of an urgent one we had a customer say they land on white page when going to https://customer.hornbill.com/focussolutions/ 

When I tested this I do briefly see a white page but then it does load the site, however it would appear our text has been removed in place for Hornbill stock stuff.  I have checked the Admin Customise Portal section and all of our normal (actual) text is there.  Furthermore I have made some changes to see it updates and saved, but it does not. 

We need this prioritising please as our Customer Portal page also shows your address - see attached.

Many thanks, 

Hiten 

 

[Hiten]

@Yodit any ideas to the above?

@Caroline 

[Keith Stevenson]

Dear @Hiten

Thanks for the post. This will be because the detected language for the end users doesnt have any translation strings (Looks like you have English (British) but not English (American). 

To resolve the issue you will need to add Translation strings for the given text under 

https://admin.hornbill.com/INSTANCENAME/portalsadv/language/

You can also Disable any languages you dont have translations for , this will ensure that only the default of English (British) is used

via 
 

https://admin.hornbill.com/INSTANCENAME/language/settings/


Kind Regards

Keith Stevenson

 

[NeilWJ]

Hi @Hiten,

Alternatively if you don't actually support translating of languages and only ever use "en-GB" then you can disable other language support and then all your portals will just use "en-GB" by default.

The view to do this is in the admin tool should be under  https://admin.hornbill.com/focussolutions//language/settings/

However if you do support other languages then as Keith mentioned you should setup translations per supported language in the portal config settings view.

Cheers

[Hiten]

Hi, 

Thanks @NeilWJ for the response, we will check but note that it was working fine and we have not changed anything nor use/support other languages.

Hiten

[Caroline]

Following on from Hiten's update yesterday, we have now removed all languages but English (British). We would however like to understand when this changed, as I don't recall seeing any announcements about this. To confirm, we had not made any changes to the customer portal prior to this issue, and it was working fine, so we just want to understand what changes Hornbill made and how we would have been made aware of these.

 

Thanks

[Gerry]

@Caroline Et'al

I am afraid we have to hold our hands up to this one.  As you may be aware from other posts, one of the things we have been doing is spitting the codebase behind the service and customer portals, this will allow us more flexibility in the future to create better and more aligned user interfaces/user experiences for your customers and employees.   Also, as part of this change we have removed some legacy technology from under the hood (PHP) as well as modernised the way in which the portal works, also under the hood. 

To the specific problem, there are two failures we need to hold our hands up to.  The first in, the Customer Portal had always had multi-language support, but the legacy code that was previously powering the portal had a defect in it, that was incorrectly not selecting the correct language.  When we implemented the code code, we of course made this function actually work, and so for a small number of customers where the supported languages were enabled, but not translated/configured, the effect was any users would now see the supported language their browser was set to by default.  Regretfully, we were not actually aware of this problem, and because the code that went out worked as we expected, we were not aware there was going to be a problem, and had no reason to suspect that customer instances portal language translations might not be enabled but not created. The original defect in the old code that masked that problem only came to light as a result of us pushing code the new, now working code.  We have provided information on how to resolve the issue and we have also made a change to the portal configuration which in future will allow you to disable multi-language support. 

The second problem is our release note publishing automation for the Customer Portal was not configured. Previous code versions were directly tied into the instance so any change release notes would have made it into the instance update release notes.  Since we split the code in order to give the portal its own life/roadmap we had failed (plain forgot if I am honest) that we also needed to get the release note automated publishing configured/enabled for that project.  This has now been corrected also. 

On both counts I can only apologies for the disruption caused, we are well aware that the optics here would have impacted your end users/customers and is far from ideal.  While not making excuses for the breakage I hope the explanation above goes some way towards explaining what went wrong. 

Thanks

Gerry