[Announcement] It's Arrived! Edit Actinic from your browser, via plugin

[gabrielcrowe]

I'm proud to announce the first beta of Actinet!.

This software enables Actinic, traditionally a very single user experience, to be accessed via a standard web browser. This innovation means that Actinic has no maximum user limits. It's possible for hundreds of people to edit online content and deal with orders simultaniously. It enables you to securely invite different parts of your company to access different areas of the shop with a password system. you can even limit any user's ability to save data in any area, or disallow them access to any financial data, keeping your finances from people who dont need to know about them.

Every tab in the Actinet user interface, is a plugin. Simple to install and set up, they provide functions to get more out of your Actinic shop. When you are granted access to a new plugin, you'll see its tab appear on the main page.

What could be simpler?

their easy to recognise icons and simple, intuitive usage, makes them a breeze, and you'll be editing your products and browsing your orders in no time.


Plugins: Order Manager
The order manager plugin for Actinet mimics the feel of the Actinic internal order manager, giving you a very easy to handle way of viewing and editing your order details.

- view your orders, in familiar tabs
- view extended order information by clicking on items
- edit customer details
- search by:
~ order number
~ customer name
~ postcode
- streamlined interface, fast loading times
- user permissions mean that saving and looking at financial data can be removed from the plugin


Plugins: Product Manager
The Product manager plugin for Actinet lets you edit your existing products.It presents you with a fast loading dynamic menu system, surprisingly similar to the one you already know so well in Actinic. You can edit the prices or products, the titles, descriptions, page names. in fact, any part of all of your
products, sections and even fragments. All in an easy tree view. Having trouble with products nested 5 sections deep? dont worry. a fast search box can find your most elusive products, deep within the catalog, so you can spend more time inserting content, instead of waiting for the interface.

Features:
- Intuitive interface, buttons do as they should
- Dynamic and quick loading tree view of your catalog, just like the one in actinic
- Search your products, sections and fragments
- View and save data on all your current catalog, edit and add data to products, sections and fragments.


About this beta
Actinet is in beta, and this means we need testers. If you want to be a tester, then please get in touch. We need testers with different sizes of business and different ways of handling shippping, and such.

Being a tester means:
- giving some spare time to investigate the software
- keeping in touch regarding problems you've found in the software
- free registration key
- refraining from piracy/handing out unauthorised copies of Actinet.


For more information on Actinet
Website: http://www.interact-studio.co.uk/interact-software.html
Email: support at interact-studio.co.uk


Questions? Suggestions?
Tag them on this thread, I'll try my best to answer.

[pnagames]

Gabriel

quick question,

is there a way in your system to add products?

i have seen you can edit existing ones but we would want the ability to add products / sections

[eighteentee]

Blimey charley! You 'ave been a busy boy.

Just one thing... how does it feed info to the stand-alone Actinic sat in the back office... or have I got the wrong end of the stick here?

[gabrielcrowe]

pna:
At this time, the interface can only edit existing products. The way actinic handles the addition of a new product would make it difficult for us to add them externally.

I'm not ruling it out for a later addition. This feature may come as Actinic adds an API to let us get at that functionality.

What we did in testing was to have the person sitting at the catalog quickly make some blank products, then use the interface to fill it all in. Very effective.

The limitations in what we have acheived thus far, are really limitations in Actinic.

eighteentee:
the actinet server is installed in the same computer that actinic is. this means that when you use your browser, you're actually acessing the same machine that your actinic database is on. its really just a highly modified web server.

[fergusw]

Gabriel,
It looks very, very nice. Some very useful features which I am sure: a) Many larger Actinic users will love, b) Actinic themselves should proobably take note of!
I have emailed you about the testing.

By the way - had to laugh at
"Actinet Core Beta1 Codename 'Vandal Savage'
in the screenshots!

[Darren B]

Gabe, dropped you an email to

Did chuckle myself, top marks looks like a great piece of work

Darren

[leehack]

Gabe, it looks great on first inspection, but you gotta get down to the dirty stuff and talk prices/costs etc.

Will it work on my Xbox?

[Darren B]

Will it work on my Xbox?

Only you Mr Hack, did not think you would have time these days

[JSnow]

this means that when you use your browser, you're actually acessing the same machine that your actinic database is on. its really just a highly modified web server.

Does this mean that the database machine needs to have a permanent internet connection (ADSL or similar)?

[leehack]

I don't like the idea of a shop needing to leave its internet connection open and its actinic software open so that it can be accessed online and worked upon. Is there anything planned or in place for this area of security?

[gabrielcrowe]

Gabe, it looks great on first inspection, but you gotta get down to the dirty stuff and talk prices/costs etc.

Will it work on my Xbox?

yes, and this is a fact.

i'v had firefox on my xbox, and had my orders displayed there. as well as editing orders and products with the control pad.

*chuckles*

[gabrielcrowe]

Does this mean that the database machine needs to have a permanent internet connection (ADSL or similar)?

in order for this to work, i'm afraid so.

however, this is only the case if your access to the database machine is over the internet.

if its a local area network, then no, you only need a network connection to the database machine, very useful for packing departments and multiple people editing content. in the same building.

[gabrielcrowe]

I don't like the idea of a shop needing to leave its internet connection open and its actinic software open so that it can be accessed online and worked upon. Is there anything planned or in place for this area of security?

the actinic frontend for the shop can be closed, the edits can be done entirely in a closed state.

the admin user can then activate and upload/download remotely, then close actinic on the remote machine.

the actinet interface is username/password protected, with different passwords for different users.

however i have to point out, that my interface is more secure than letting people have physical access to the machine. this way, the users have limited access to the various sub systems of actinic.

at the end of the day, if your network isnt secure, you're letting yourself down. the security hole isnt Actinet.

with this in mind, the server can be locked down to certain ip addresses, as well as subnets. it can also have another layer of password protection added, at the root folder level and can run on nonstandard ports.

with the help of hamachi, you can encrypt the traffic between you and the server, to stop packet sniffing tools from grabbing meaningful data.

with the release of this beta, we'll see how secure we can make the whole deal. we have taken the security of data very seriously.

[leehack]

Sounds very good dude, thanks for the answers.

[gabrielcrowe]

get down to the dirty stuff and talk prices/costs etc

we're in discussion over how low we can get the price for people.

we want this to be for the smaller people, who want to work remotely, as well as the larger companies, that have plenty of users.

I can say however, that the price will be per URL/shop.

The initial beta seen here contains only 3 plugins. one of them being a useful but not essential rss feed application. the other two are the order plug and the products plug.

In development are several powerful plugins that add in gracefully, and these will be very low priced. remember, that there is no user cap on the server. you can have hundreds of people dealing with order information. the license isnt user number based.

rest assured, the price will be cheaper than multiuser, by a very long way.