Drop Down menus have disappeared no changes to store design

[fabricgarden]

Hi,

I am completely desperate. I logged a call with support two days ago and the issue is unresolved. My drop down menus have simply disappeared. I paid 3dcart a year ago to develop these. My customers can no longer navigate around my site and I am loosing sales.

I am about to launch a major campaign which I have to delay because of this issue.

Has anyone else experience this? Can anyone else give me a faster response than I am getting?

Looks like support will do nothing now as it is heading to the weekend and I am in Australia and we have hit time differences. I am very disappointed.

Regards. Sue

[fabricgarden]

I have not had one response to my email and it looks like the support desk is now closed. Completely unacceptable.

[elightbox]

I would assume you have made some change that made them disappear. I would suggest you restore to an earlier copy.

Use a program like Download Beyond Compare to see the differences between the old and new frame templates and you will find out what changed.

[fabricgarden]

As per Andrew in support have temporarily installed any template so that the menus work (after backing up mine). Hopefully it doesn't take too long to resolve the issue

[fabricgarden]

This is support's response.

So the developer advised that the reason its not working is because there are invalid characters in category or sub category names. Since this is ASP based characters like the ampersand and apostrophe can break things. I looked through your categories and this is what I found. I hid the ones that don't say 'ok' and your drop down worked. I didn't make any permanent changes to your store, after verifying that it worked I put your temporary template back and left your categories turned on. So basically all you have to do is rename the categories with the ampersand and apostrophes and replace them with the HTML equivalent from this list - HTML Codes - Table of ascii characters and symbols

The ASCII characters referred to have been in my store for over a year e.g Books & Patterns and the menu's worked perfectly until 3 days ago. Looks like some changes have been rolled out which causes these characters interfere with the menus and thus the issue. I am sure other users in the community will have this issue as well - so I thought I would share the response.

Actually - this is rubbish. Based on the email above, the menus should not work at all regardless of which template I use. The issue must be related to the 3dcart customised menus that I purchased. The category name is not being parsed as text. I am not a programmer - otherwise I am sure this could be fixed by comparing the standard templates and the customised one I have.

Sue

[jleclair]

patterns & books is working right now.

did you ultimately find the solution or?

[fabricgarden]

This was supports answer - the fact that 3dcart designed my menus - one wonders why they used ASP and not HTML? Something must have changed as my menus worked for 15 months with these symbols and overnight stopped working.

''The reason the categories work on the other templates and not your custom one is because the other templates are generated through HTML. The custom design you have is using a custom ASP menu. These characters that aren't working right now on the menu are called escape characters. When the ASP parses those characters it cancels the rest of the code from running. I'm honestly not sure how these could have worked before on this menu. Putting them in the other format avoids this issue"

Sue