Magerealm

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - Arthur C. Clarke

Bugs and Flaws

Like all software, Sandvox has some bugs and design flaws. Thankfully there aren't too many, but I wouldn't be using it if there were. Even with the bugs it is still the best and easiest website design software I have used (including Dream Weaver, Freeway, Freeway Express, iWeb, and RapidWeaver). Keep in mind that all of these occur with my site, which has about 900 html pages, and most of those are in the photo gallery.

Page Load / Redraw Time - Case 20540
This one is a design flaw. When I start up Sandvox, switch to a new page, or tell Sandvox to re-render the current page, it can take over 20 seconds for the page to display. The effect is definitely related to the number of descendent pages under the one you are trying to view. For example, when I try to edit the top page in my site (or the top page in the gallery section), it takes over 20 seconds. However, if I try to edit a bottom level (leaf) page, it takes about 3 seconds. During that time, 1 of my computer's CPUs (a Quad G5 2.5GHz w/ 4.5GB of RAM and 10k RPM drives) is completely hammered.

I suspect that each time you choose a page in the Site Outline Sandvox examines every node anywhere under it in the hierarchy. It would probably require some serious changes to the base classes, but if they changed it so it only loaded enough of the children to display the index/summary for that page it could be a huge speed increase.

Inability to Edit Captions - Case 20556
This one is most definitely a bug. On most of the photo pages in my site, I am unable to edit the captions for the photos. It appears to be related to something in some designs, as it does affect the included Minimalist design, as well as the custom design for this site (which was based on the Minimalist design). It doesn't appear to affect the Neo News design though, which leads to a workaround for the problem. Whenever I want to edit photo captions, I need to switch to the Neo News design, do all of the editing, then switch back to the correct design. Doing this allows me to get the text into the program, but it also forces Sandvox to republish the entire site even if I only edit 1 page.

Unfortunately (for me anyway), I am the only person to have reported this bug, so fixing it is a rather low priority. I'm hoping other people have run into this issue and just haven't taken the time to report it. If you have run into it please report it to Karelia. Hopefully enough people will report it so that it will be a higher priority to fix.

BTW, I would like tosay THANK YOU to Mike at Karelia for finding the workaround, as that issue had held me up from finishing my website conversion for a couple of months. Once I finally contacted them about the issue he had the workaround the day after I uploaded a copy of my site file. This is one of the reasons I really like the company, as they are quick with responses on bugs and truly are helpful.

Photo Page Date / Sorting - Case 20554
When creating a photo page, Sandvox tries to set the creation date of the page to the EXIF date from the photo. There appears to be a bug in how this is implemented. If you try to drop multiple photos onto a collection (so adding multiple images to a photo gallery), it only sets the creation date on the first page. Unfortunately for me, most of my site is photo pages. Hopefully when they fix this bug they will also provide a way to have Sandvox go through a site and reset all of the creation dates for photo pages.

Faulty Undo/Redo
I think this is a bug, but it may be a design flaw as well. It actually got me while editing this section of my blog today. I started editing the summary for this page in the parent, and thought it was editing a custom summary. Unfortunately, it was editing the actual text of the page, so I lost all of the content. I realized this right after doing the edit, but to find out I had to go back to the page and check it. After doing that, undo wouldn't work anymore. It was still available in the Edit menu, but it didn't do anything. At the least it should have been disabled so I wouldn't have false hope, but it would have been even better if it would have actually undone the change.

© 2007 Chris Giard and Anne-Marie Pleau