Installation Requirements

[sergio gomes]

Hi
On the Actinic download Centre tells about some requirements to install Actinic V01.01, as below:

IMPORTANT - EXISTING USERS
Before upgrading:
- Back up your site
- Suspend ordering on your site
- Wait for about half an hour and download any orders
After upgrading:
- Refresh your site
- Re-instate ordering

What does "Suspend ordering on your web site" mean?

Thanks
Sergio

[leehack]

Within actinic: Help > Help topics > Search is always a good place to find information on actinic functions Sergio, always remember to search before posting as you often find better information with pictures to illustrate also.

I'm not aware of one person that suspends before uploading personally, just do the upgrade and upload at a quiet time, usually over night would be my recommendation. ALWAYS backup before you upgrade though, NEVER forget that.

[sergio gomes]

Yes, I do always look for information before posting.
However, I am new using Actinic and suspending ordering, even overnight, will not be good news for us.
Do I really need to suspend ordering?
Thanks Lee

[leehack]

Like i said, i don't know of one site that does suspend ordering, IMO it is counterproductive and loses more sales than it saves. I'd upgrade and then publish the site late at night thus impacting the least possible on the site and your users. As close to 3am as you can is my usual recommendation, i think most people give in at midnight and just do it then.

[brucet]

We advise suspending ordering to allow time for all shoppers to complete their orders, and those orders to all be downloaded, before you upgrade.

Supposing you download orders into your previous version; then while you are in the process of upgrading, and before you have uploaded your upgraded store, another shopper completes an order. You will have, say, a v9 order waiting on the site the first time you download into v10. In this case v10 may throw an error and be unable to download the order, and you will need assistance to delete it from the website.

To suspend ordering, tick the 'Suspend' box in the 'Ordering' tab of the Business Settings, then Publish to Web.

[leehack]

On major version changes I can see why, on interim ones I personally see no point and wouldn't recommend it at all. I presume Sergio is talking about going from 10 to 10.01 here, maybe he is not?

It's a sliding scale from a quiet site to a very busy site and they all come out with the same answer in my eyes, don't do it. The quieter your site is, the less chance you have of affecting anyone, the busier your site is, the more lost sales you will have while the site is suspended, waits, refreshes and then unsuspends.

Couple into that things like switching off adwords campaigns, possible connection issues and the occasional hissy fit where actinic simply will not do what it is supposed to for hours and I think the path of least resistance is best.

Possibility of a few messed up sales to clear up versus sales lost for hours, no contest for me on interim upgrades, actinic simply is not quick enough at doing all of these actions on a medium to large store for me to close it down completely.

[leehack]

PS - it brings up an interesting point with regards to suspending of the catalog, it's 2010, v10 of the software, let's take a look at ways of suspending the ordering on a site in a cleverer way, without the need for an upload of every single page to write suspended on each page and remove the add to cart button.

V10 has shown up some rather clever use of JS, it wouldn't perhaps need to even get that clever, get the add to cart wrapped in a div, with its visibility switching between hidden and not, thus a simple blockif in the css could suspend ordering across the store in seconds by simply hiding the add to cart button, when suspending the ordering is requested. That action alone could save hours on a medium to large site IF people were to follow the instructions laid out before them by actinic.

Now we're talking............

[Duncan Rounding]

Get 's my vote - good thinking batman!