LIVE DATA - The Future of Acinic???

[TiggyPig]

I have heard that V8 will be server based rather than based on a local machine. Hence the probability of live stock control/management is a thing I think they would feature.

Be daft not too... If true of course

[completerookie]

all comments we've heard is that it will NOT be server based !

[B_Online]

Why not have the option for both?

[RuralWeb]

I hope it will not be server based as that would leave me looking for another shopping solution to use.

If people are trying to drive Actinic towards a server based system just to solve the problem of stock control then they should spend some money themselves to solve the problem and not make Actinic follow the crowd. They may have outgrown Actinic but all the clients I have are very happy with the way stock control works.

[Mike Hughes]

I agree with rural web in that I'd rather see actinic stick with static HTML pages. To me the benefits in terms of SE friendly pages and file names and fast loading pages outweigh any disadvantages from the lack of dynamic stock control.

For most businesses the important thing about stock control is to avoid going out of stock in the first place. It drives me mad as a consumer when I finally decide to buy something only to find that they don't have it. For the retailer it's a lost sale and this costs money in terms of getting the customer in the first place (real cash down the drain) lost profit from the sale (lost potential) plus one annoyed customer.

If actinic is serious about sorting out stock control, I'd rather see the effort put into an effective back end stock control/ordering system to help users maintain stock at adequate levels and then link into the catalog for the rare occasion when items do go out of stock and cannot be replenished.

I have developed my own system for this and with a bit more work it will remove any need for dynamic stock control on the catalog pages.

Mike

[steveaich]

From what has been said on this board and on an Actinic training course V8 will not be server based, V9 however may be (and I believe this may be under development, or this may be the new php based product released a week or so ago, who knows as Actinic are more secretive than a 5 yr old school girl). Use of Jan's one-stop pretty much solves the problem of stock control, unless you are doing thousands of transactions per day, then what is the likelyhood of two people ordering the same product in the 10mins between uploads?

Having a static site does have a number of benefits, both in search engine terms, speed of the site loading and also in terms of security as there is no online database to secure, if it isn't there it isn't vulnerable.

On the whole, while some aspects of a server based solution would bring benefits, the non-server solution is one of the aspects of actinic which make it different and such a popular choice.

It would be better for Actinic to concentrate on improving aspects such as online registration, the checkout process (it's too long), the shipping functionality (see my other posts on this subject), upsell, the over complex template system, back end stock control and order processing etc etc etc. There is plenty to do without changing the whole basis of the product.

[axpoint]

Im not knocking Actinics strong points...

Some of you guys seem mildly offended by my comments... the purpose of this thread is not to slate Actinic as a product but to offer suggestion as to fantastic improvements that can be made.

A couple of people have made comments about SEO being affected with the integration of PHP. This is nonsense, static pages can still be produced that are search engine friendly, the dynamic content, that it would be nice to be able to grab from a database, is product price, show / hide capabilities and maybe description, sections and product pages etc could be built within Actinic. This would give clients access to those features alone.

I rarely build sites that dont need some intranet / extranet functionality this is Actinics weakness despite its strong points.

Live Data systems just makes sense!

[pinbrook]

I think a server based solution would be useful, but we now have that in Actinic Express. This seems a good toe in the water solution.

I have deployed a few OSC sites as they are cheap to do and server based, thus allowing me and the client instant access all the time.

For "grown up" sites I would still prefer to see a static HTML set up, maybe with a PHP platform.

But it is one of those define your need and then find the solution scenarios, rather than try to fit the solution to the requirement.

I've just seen this in the forum here "I'm looking for someone who could design an actinic-based store for our business start-up. I can update the products and the other business settings myself so it's really only the design of the templates that I need done." as further proof that some shop keepers do not want to pay a developer to do the monkey work.

[jont]

Posted in v6 section yesterday by Tracey

Hi, I'm afraid that I have no more information of version of the Catalog with MySQL capabilites apart from the fact that it isn't included in v8.

[irishactinic]

holidays here i come

Last year i spent a lonely christmas in a flat with a leak in the ceiling. I was running one site using actinic catalog. I have recently bought developer. I am now in the process of setting up three sites that all feature digital downloads. Next year i might be on a beach in Thailand, although come to think of it, it is probably a good thing i didnt discover developer the year before.

Andy

[Bob Isaac]

A couple of people have made comments about SEO being affected with the integration of PHP. This is nonsense, static pages can still be produced that are search engine friendly, the dynamic content, that it would be nice to be able to grab from a database, is product price, show / hide capabilities and maybe description, sections and product pages etc could be built within Actinic. This would give clients access to those features alone.

I agree, I have just moved our very active forum to the vBulletin package and that is SE friendly.

Bob