What do you want in V11

[glasgowmike]

Hide if out of stock - not component

If an item is out of stock and stock monitoring is enabled, it would be nice to have a tick option that would enable Actinic to hide the product automatically. I have trolled through the forum to find out there is a feature for components of products. However, if you carry an item, it is out of stock and you don't want the 'out of stock' message and just want the product hidden, it would be nice to have this (imho).

[alexwren]

V11 would be ace if it had...

1. A better editor, Actinic's is really rather basic. The one the forum uses here is far better with lots of useful facilities that can only be replicated in Actinic with very unfriendly and pointless code.

2. Ability to skip the 'checking spiral of doom' for a change that has simply not gone near the sections it changes. Love to be able to upload single pages like you can product sections (right hand click method).

3. Ability to choose for products to be removed/hidden if they are not included on an import (of the refresh type) or using the link option.

4. Better use of H tags with regard to SEO. Current use is rather weird.

5. Ability to close up the pages on the product tree so that the product sections are not puched off the bottom. THIS DRIVES OUR CLIENTS MENTAL.

6. Use hyphens not underscores for auto page naming and stop capitalising words in such a daft way, lowercase is just fine.

7. When viewing style sheet in design view, you have to close it to edit page code. Would love to see it docked in an area allowing live editing in both windows.

8. After previewing page in browser (from design view) after making changes to code) Actinic default back to past previewed area not what you were last looking at. This could mean you edit the wrong bit of code understandably thinking it was what you were last looking at.

9. Ability to create an imageless/additionalfileless snapshot where it was easy to pass around to support when images are not needed. In this mode it would simply show a universal simple image resized to fit the original space. Uploading a 1GB snapshot is no mean feat and can mean massive delays in getting speedy support.

10. Inbuilt option for reordering products without the daftness currently needed to make product alphabetical or as otherwise required.

11. Better error handling if 'External Links' file missing or problematic. Currently Actinic just hangs if there is an issue and you need to force close.

12. Option to link search results to extended info page and customise them easier to have images and look more like every other search results in the world without massive work.

13. Option to export orders/accounts to assist with migration between upgrades and rebuilds. Current export options can overwrite other data sometimes.

14. Ability to use both 'External Links' and real time stock control. Surely these were made for each other.

15. Addition of default Favicon (as every page load will cause a 404 without it)

16. Addition of robots.txt to exclude SE's from folders (ie CGI-BIN)

17. Formating of bounce page message is bunched up and link is too small and whole line in smaller font

18. A version for mac users that is supported by Actinic support.

Sorry for the long list but hopefully these might be helpful.

Alex

[LUKE@BREP]

New for v11

List of features that would be useful or a must for v11:

1. Online Accounts (creation/order tracking) - this is a must!

2. Choice at Upload (so can just upload bit you have changed instead of everything)

3. Customer Reviews/Comments without paying for an extra module

4. Postcode based shipping charges

5. More support for integrating own data (dynamic and static)

6. HTML emails (at present you have to do a mod of script and it still doesn't come out right when emailed)

7. Multiple Saved Carts

8. Product Wishlists

9. Easier access to customers saved carts (so cart can be emailed asking for better pricing or can be uploaded for customers to see what we have provided as quote - would link to customer accounts so they could have list of quotes/multiple saved carts)

[djferros]

If V11 just has these two amendments i'll be happy;

1) online accounts with order history - it's so standard!
(including ability to download invoices, at least for b2b sites)

2) stop this 'hidden products' rubbish that i have to do to get my pricing correct.

[Sean Williams]

I agree with just about all the suggestions raised.
The one major requirement for me is operationally secure and stable versions on initial release, not after a couple of updates.
I understand that no software is bug-free, but I continue to be surprised how many significant bugs were in V10 when it came out.
It would be marvellous if V11 came along, with lots of these useful functions mentioned here incorporated, but completely dispiriting if we couldn't risk installing and using it due to bugs.

[george]

The current duplicate product system is a shambles. And has been since Noah paired up the animals.
The Single Product Page creation is like ...zzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZ.
Customers have been asking for online accounts.
A `sort by` option at the top of pages is now common on other sites.
I still think there should be a `one click to the next order` when you have an order open. Poor votes when I suggested it though.

There's more but the upload has finshed so I can do some work now.

Also the MU hasn't worked properly for us for ages, we gave up on it in the end.

[jont]

The ability to use the back delete button
The entry field to take focus when creating a block if
Layout selector field to take focus when searching for a layout
Design view not to lose focus when generating an external preview
Better keyboard navigation when adding products

Nothing fancy - just better usability when using the software 14+ hours per day

[BPJ553]

The ability to create temporary products on the go when entering telephone orders

[BPJ553]

The absolute must have for me = online order history and account creation - Otherwise I'll have to make plans to leave.

Single use vouchers.

I would also like the ability to manually move payment pending/partial payment received to the completed tab. If I have a cancelation or refund the order remains forever incomplete until deleted. We then loose the track history of the order. Some sort of 'force move' option, or 'refunded' status.

[Mike Hughes]

Just to add another area that could do with being more interactive: Checkout.

In particular, I'd like to be able to make delivery options depend on the time and day of week, to have a delivery message show that depends on the time of day ("After 4pm on Friday so expected delivery date will be Tuesday 14th") or also on product variables ("This T-Shirt customisation takes 5 working days", etc).

Again, though. Nothing that can't be done with static product pages and a dynamic PHP/MySQL module for:

- Interaction (ratings, reviews, Q+A, comments)
- Search (order by price, reviews, relevance, manufacturer, Asc/Desc, etc)
- Customer Management (online account creation, view order status, change address details, contact preferences (such as email, text) etc)
- Flexible checkout

Mike

EDIT: PS. As Ben mentions below and others have above, the flexible checkout should also be able to cope with single use vouchers, loyalty scheme points, etc.

[Donna Kempster]

Again I have v9.5 so I don't know if these have been improved in v10. Also getting an understanding on time lines of products - we are considering upgrading to v10 as I like the changes made to a different delivery address plus the fact that you can choose which site you log onto in multi-user but now there's all this talk of v11 ... what timescale are we talking?

I agree with Chris on the reporting side.

Emails are poor IMO. You can't really change the layout or what's included because of the way they are set up.

Deriving mailing lists. You can select on what customers have purchased etc but you can't select on what offers have made them respond.

Creating products and duplicating them into sections I agree is really time consuming.

The biggest bug bear I have is ordering products within sections. This is so hit and miss with the page preview bug. I'd like to see a sort by function - alphabetically, price, so that you click a button and the section is ordered without having to move it in chunks every time you add a new product.

Seeing what people have ordered before when searching for a customer in offline ordering

Something done to improve the crankiness of the syncro server.

[Jan]

For them to move into the areas that some people are discussing would be tantamount to online suicide.

I agree with you on that point. I also think that people are posting solutions not requirements. There are probably ways to meet the requirements that also allow Actinic to build and improve on what they have, perhaps along the lines of the hybrid solution that a couple of people have mentioned.

Regards,

[wesleythorne]

actinics main strength for us in actinic payments and off-line orders

also it has a good back end and actinic link

downside multi user is a bit quirky
very slow to add new products into multiple sections
search results for onlin search very unpredictable

[leehack]

If actinic stray too far away from their strength, they will just end up as another fish in a rather large ocean, i couldn't think of anything more dangerous for them to do personally. It needs a facelift and updating so that it contains what we'd now consider as standard features on an ecommerce site, but if they try and cut it in a market that they have not competed in yet, i think they will vanish like a fart in the wind very very quickly.

For them to move into the areas that some people are discussing would be tantamount to online suicide. They do not have the resource or the investment for such a drastic change in such a short time, it needs to be done in stages, but it's true those stages need to pick up the pace and catch up in the areas where most of us agree they are lacking.

[pinbrook]

But, having relevant keywords in the filename is still a major advantage of Actinic's approach. So a page called 'Blue-widgets.html' will do much better than something like "View.php?SectionID=1003&ProductRef=2163&Order=AlphaN" (all else being equal).

most DB apps allow you to set a URL pagename which eliminates this type of url

For example we do this on the pinbrook site (drupal) - take this page for example

http://www.pinbrook.net/actinic-user-conference-2010

if i didn't set the pagename it would be

http://www.pinbrook.net/node/187

I can set the page URL in a similar manner to the same option in Actinic.

But I digress....

speaking to clients with Actinic sites, a few of them are saying they like using other apps whether it be gmail, wordpress etc etc because it gives then flexibility to work anywhere and someone else bears the brunt of backups etc. They are beginning to feel constrained by the desktop nature of Actinic. Although I fully understand it is a major rewrite to take A online, maybe there should be more development on Express. Much in the same way a certain competitor is currently marketing its ecomm software where the hosted version gets all the new features before the software that peeps buy to self host and develop.