Uploads - My thoughts.

[Buzby]

I have two issues with the way that Actinic uploads to the site. If these could be changed it would save me a lot of time and would certainly be worthwhile upgrading to V9 for this alone.

Issue 1

When adding new products I find that the place holders are added to the side bars prior to the images being uploaded and the product being live.

Would it be possible during an upload for Actinic to add the new products and images first so that when it updates all the pages through the site you don't get missing images and inactive products.

When I add new products I am having to FTP the images in first so that when each page is loaded it doesn't look awful with missing images.

I also find that if you click on this new product it is not available, although advertised in the side bar, until it has been uploaded alphabetically. If you click the advertised new product you receive an error message on the site.

Issue 2

My website takes about 80 minutes to do all the pre-upload checks prior to making the simplest of changes. I have always felt that Actinic should have the ability to just FTP in a changed page.

Example, I change a description or price which then takes me 80 minutes to change on the site due to the pre-upload checks. For this time Actinic is unusable.

Why can we not just have a button on each product and section to just update the necessary pages and files within seconds?

[RuralWeb]

v9 is finished now so if these feature which are already on the wish list were to be considered then you would be looking at v10 at the earliest!

[cbarling]

Mal, you're quite right that v9 is pretty much finished.

What I can now tell you, however, is that we are now planning some work on speeding up site generation and upload. This should come to fruition in a v9 maintenance release.

Chris

[RuralWeb]

planning some work on speeding up site generation and upload

Great News

[Steve G Griggs]

Upload and site generation speed.

Great news indeed.

[leehack]

If anything substantial can be achieved in this area, it will certainly be a massive plus point. With the onset of SPPs and sites listing more and more products, this area of actinic can be a real issue for large site owners. I worked on 3 sites last year, which had really long upload times, if that could be halved, it would make such a difference, it really would.

My only concern is how much you can realistically improve it, Actinic's method of working is also it's achilles heel in this area IMO. A 2 hour upload needs to be cut to 80-90 mins for this to have any real worth i expect, otherwise it largely goes unnoticed. 8.5.2 had some speed improvements if memory serves me correct, however they don't seem to have ever been mentioned. Anyone seen an improvement in that area, i haven't had a large enough site of late to really be able to tell?

[RuralWeb]

Anyone seen an improvment in that area, i haven't had a large enough site of late to really be able to tell?

Ive seen some improvements but nothing huge

[cbarling]

I will be very disappointed if we can't make some noticeable improvements.

Of course, it's impossible to put figures on it at this stage, and the nature of v8 (which has a lot of ways of configuring things) can mean that different sites that are a similar size can perform quite differently. As I said, though, I believe that we can make a real difference.

We already have people looking at this, but it will be a few months before the work is finished and can be released.

Chris

[fergusw]

My only concern is how much you can realistically improve it, Actinic's method of working is also it's achilles heel in this area IMO. A 2 hour upload needs to be cut to 80-90 mins for this to have any real worth i expect

I can see how the uploading checking/creating could be improved, but the one "brick wall" factor in improving the speed is simply the physical size of any files that need to be FTP'd to the server e.g. during refreshes etc
Large sites, by their nature, have many, many HTML/Cat files and large FIL files etc and there is no getting round the fact that they have to be uploaded at some point.
e.g. Website with 10,000 product pages (esp. with single product pages) with average HTML size of 10Kb = approx 90+ Mb of files to upload, and that takes time.