Over the last two weeks, you may have seen a drop in the number of products in the PixelMill catalog. This update was due to two issues that prompted product removal and update.
1) Two Year Shelf-life – We have implemented a two year shelf-life on all products submitted to the PixelMill catalog. Standards and browser compatibility change often, and these changes can be significant over a two – four year period. To ensure that we continue to offer top-quality products at an excellent value, we felt it was important to remove (or update) products added to the catalog over two years ago.
2) SWFObject Code – An April update to Internet Explorer caused many Flash movies to stop working as expected. The ActiveX update requires users to click an ActiveX object once before it will work. This required us to find a solution that made the templates work correctly out-of-the-box. Therefore, we started the tedious process of updating nearly 2,000 products that used Flash movies. We temporarily provided a warning in the catalog to show which templates were affected, but we felt it was time to remove those products.
Now, all products with Flash use the new SWFObject code, which provides an effective work-around to this problem. Please see our SWFObject support article for more about the problem and the solution we’re using.
We apologize if this update has caused any inconveniences, but we would prefer to sell a product we’re confident will meet your expectations than sell an average product that needs additional work to function properly.