Extending Actinic?

[luka]

I've been fiddling with customising Actinic for a while and have found it very flexible and this forum has helped me learn faster.

My question however is:

What happens when a client wants to add features such as consumer reviews, voting, affiliates or a stats package to their e-commerce site.

They also think that a custom solution is too expensive.
What are the problems or limitations that people have experienced when trying to add features to an actinic site.

And, what is the middle ground between an Actinic site and a custom solution that costs a packet.

Basically when advising someone with an e-commerce site, at what point is it no longer effective to bolt on feature to actinic, as customisable as it is.


thanks in advance,


Luka.

[Jan]

My host (Harlequin) has a whole load of scripts that can be used with Actinic, things like product review, currency conversion, product templates, email to a friend, the scripts have been developed as part of site customisation and they are in the process of making these available to their clients for free (I think - sorry Steve if I am wrong here), so maybe you could do something like that for your clients.

Norman Rouxel also has some shareware products that can be installed at a low cost, so it would be worth you looking at those.

I have a free software library that can be used by my customers and members of my mailing list (you would not be allowed to distribute these to your customers, but they could join my list and then use them). I add to it each month but currently is has label printing for return address labels or special offers, an extended sales analysis report (it has graphics to make it clearer), a site map report which is useful for checking your site structure and proof reading your product descriptions, instructions for turning your Actinic customers into a mailing list for email marketing and more.

Actinic also have several articles that are worth reading through on various aspects of ecommerce. See their website for details.

So there are lots of things that you can do at little or no cost to you that allow you to extend the Actinic site.

Regards,