Actinic as a cms and blog tool.

[gabrielcrowe]

traceyhand and I have been playing with Actinic in the chat (more her than me tbh).

We have decided that Actinic is a very good tool for content management and not just selling.

Its also a good blog tool.

If you use products and edit the templates, and date them, you can have a great deal of control over your content. it takes very little time to make a basic template. remove all references to the cart its actually quite good.

Not to mention that 'new products' can become 'new entries/blogs/reviews'.

Actinic needs to look into this. A version of Actinic like, 'Actinic Website', that has no selling power, but is very good at having content. perhaps a better html editor, and even something like search by date, would make a very easy cms product, that Actinic people can already get their heads around.

I'd use Actinic for content, if only i diddnt have to fiddle with the templates to 'mute' the selling parts.

well, thats my two cents.

[jont]

If you use products and edit the templates, and date them, you can have a great deal of control over your content. it takes very little time to make a basic template. remove all references to the cart its actually quite good.

I have been advocating this for a while - using products as fragments allows great access to features which Actinic ignores when part of a fragment

[Goz]

I too mentioned this to them about 18 months ago. I suggested they could have a different licensing structure for pure CMS sites. Not heard a thing about it.

[fergusw]

I covered something along these lines in expanding the functionality of the brochure pages and fragments in this thread

There is no reason why these CMS ideas cannot be integrated straight in.

[RuralWeb]

Yep me also - Ive used it a few times as a CMS tool and in many cases it is actually far easier for people to use than something like Contribute. The LE25 version of the software is possibly the best to use as it then allows a few products to be sold as well as run the site eg a B&B can easily run thier site using it and take online bookings/deposits - it works out cheaper than Contribute.

[pixelhaus]

Actinic could be a fantastic CMS with only a few changes already discussed. I've used it as a cms/gallery site for these guys and they are really happy with it. (the learning curve is considerably shallower than joomla et al) http://www.gluefactory.co.uk

[pixelhaus]

On the same subject, can anyone recommend a suitable banner ad manager that integrates ok ?

[1stweb]

We Have Been Doing This for 6 Years

We have been using Actinic as a CMS for at least 6 years as it is the easiest system for clients to use.

It does take a while to modify it to work as a pure CMS.