[SOLVED] Product Image Disappearing

Hi! Recently come back to Hikashop after a series of projects that have mandated Virtuemart. I have to say that coming back here is like escaping from a lunatic asylum - VM is such a mess, so well done Hikashop!

I have just put together a catalogue site where each of the products has 1 image and a number of characteristics.

When the product is displayed the main image (there is only one) is displayed correctly, however when any characteristic is selected (they are being presented in a drop down), the product image disappears. Its like Hika is looking for a different image for each characteristic.

Is it possible to configure Hika so that the main product image is the "default" image and therefore displayed for any characteristic that is selected?

Thanks

Hi,

I think that the next release of HikaShop (1.6.0) should fix this problem.
This version should be publish beginning of next week.

Regards,

Thanks Jerome - Look forward to the new release.

However - I've noticed that there is this feature (not available in the free version) called Options. I have to say it's not clear to me what the difference is...

Would it be better for me to use Options rather than Characteristics?

The products I'm working need to have a number of selectable features such as: Package Color (3), Fragrance (25), Box Quantity (3). I don't need to work with different images for each of the features (I just want 1).

This is resulting in 225 product variants being generated and one of these product pages is taking upwards of 20 seconds to load. Obviously, this is not a workable solution and I'm wondering whether Options will provide the answer or does it also create variants in the same way?

Hi,

An option is another product which could be attached to the product (like a insurance).
A characteristic is a product modification (a color for example) which would have his own price, quantity, image, etc.

By mixing both, you can make something like: demo.hikashop.com/index.php?option=com_h...ayout=show&Itemid=91
The color is a variant.
Each other elements (webcam, RAM, etc) are options which are products with variants.

Regards,

Jerome - OK, got it, thanks.

So, any ideas why loading my product page with the variants is soooooooooo slow?!!

Also, how is the new release coming on that fixes the image issue (I've also noticed that the description is disappearing too when a variant is selected) - this seems like a pretty big bug to me?

Yes, the new release fixes the description issue.

When you use characteristics, HikaShop has to generate one variant for each combination of values of the characteristics. That can quickly amount to a lot of variants.
Because of that the processing gets slower and the product page bigger to load.

With the new release, we introduce an improvement on that end so that should help avoid that for fresh installs of HikaShop (when there are no hikashop tables in the database before installing).
However, if you have a lot of characteristics/values, it's most likely that you should instead use options or custom fields of the table "item". They don't handle per variant quantity/image/description/etc handling, but on the other end they are a lot less resource intensive.

Hi Nicolas - thanks for your reply. I have now loaded the new version (1.6) and it does indeed fix the description issue. However, it has not addressed the issue with the main product image disappearing when a characteristic is selected in the product detail page.

Unfortunately I've more or less populated my shop with the products, so in order to take advantage of the speed improvements for products with a large number of variants does this mean I will have to uninstall Hikashop, ensuring the tables are deleted, re-install and re-create the products or is there a way to export my products and reload them into the new schema?

I'm really up against it now with regard to the image problem and would appreciate some help. Is there anything you need from me to identify why 1.6 didn't address the image problem?

We are currently looking at the images display issues and we should publish shortly a new build which will fix that (in a few hours).

With the 1.6.0 release we added modifications to the variants handling so that it will display the pages faster.That is however not activated by default to avoid updating issues.
To activate that, you should add an entry in the table hikashop_config via phpmyadmin with the namekey variant_increase_perf and the value 1

Nicolas,

Thanks as always for your responses. Look forward to testing the new release.

I'll backup my site and then test out the performance modification.

We published the new build. Just download again and update.

Nicolas - I downloaded the 31.08.2012 build this morning and installed over the top of yesterday's build but this does not fix the product image disappearing issue.

I am currently developing on localhost but can upload to a staging server if you need access...

Thanks.

We would need a back end and FTP access to reproduce the problem as we can't reproduce it on our end.
It would help if you could provide that via our contact form (with a link to this thread):
www.hikashop.com/en/contact-us.html

Hi Nicolas - have you managed to look at this? I'm stuck and cannot release the website until this is solved.

Your help is appreciated....

Hi,

I just had the time to look at your website.

The problem was an access rights issue. I've changed all your folders under media/com_hikashop/upload to 777 and the images are all displaying fine on your staging2 website as far as I can see.

Nicolas

Don't think that this is the issue!

When a product is loaded say : staging2.bonzomedia.co.uk/index.php/exte...duct/265-liquid-soap the image loads perfectly, always has. However, if a characteristic is chosen then the image disappears. Why would changing the access permissions change the behaviour if it is the same image?

Anyway, you can see from the link above that this is still not working...

Nicolas - finally figured this out, the issue is related to Shape5's implementation of lazy loading of images as per this thread - www.hikashop.com/ja/forum/4-how-to/47492...q-configuration.html

I've switched off lazyload and all is well.

Thank you for your assistance.

Regards