Firstly I have to say how happy we are with Actinic v7.x and it's primary purpose. We have been trading for with our Actinic based site for just over a year of trading without any issues whatsoever. There have been a few questions re: layout or customisation of the menus but for out and out reliability of the product it has been 100%.
So with all that out of the way and the business settling down into it's routine we wanted to start producing mailshots to our customers. Firstly we were disappointed that there wasn't a std report that would dump out the email addresses from the database (ignoring duplicates). To be honest that seems a bit of a no brainer to us. *waits to stand corrected that it can be done*
So we opened up the database in Ms Access and found the field "Email Address" in the table "Person". On a side note it was interesting to see exactly how our customers input data into mandatory fields during the checkout process. From the entries like blah@blah.com or 000@000 or even N/A I'm guessing this field is basically freeform text. I'm guessing this is more to do with MS Access rather than Actinic? With that in mind would/could it not be sensible to have written some sort of html entry checking code into those fields so that at least it makes sure the customer enters a string with the very minimum of *.@.*.*?
At this point I must point out we are only using the Catalog version of the product not the Business version. In a perfect world each customer would have to validate their own email address before they can submit their first order. I'm guessing each customer would then have to create an account before that could be done. Not sure some of our customers want to have to register everytime they wish to order from a site like ours. Some have said it's good that they do not have to create an account.
So
1) is email address validation available in any version of Actinic 7.*?
2) is there a way to produce a report in Actinic to output email addresses to a flat file?
3) Will there ever be the functionality in current or future versions of Actinic where you can create a single email and then send to all or a subset of the customers?
For the time being I have written a script to export the data out of the database, excluding duplicates and invalid formats (i.e. without an @ in the string) and finally output the result into a file that can be copied and pasted in to "To:" field in a mail client. All in all alot of work for something that surely alot of customers woudl like to see in the Actinic product?
Feedback and comments would be appreciated.
So with all that out of the way and the business settling down into it's routine we wanted to start producing mailshots to our customers. Firstly we were disappointed that there wasn't a std report that would dump out the email addresses from the database (ignoring duplicates). To be honest that seems a bit of a no brainer to us. *waits to stand corrected that it can be done*
So we opened up the database in Ms Access and found the field "Email Address" in the table "Person". On a side note it was interesting to see exactly how our customers input data into mandatory fields during the checkout process. From the entries like blah@blah.com or 000@000 or even N/A I'm guessing this field is basically freeform text. I'm guessing this is more to do with MS Access rather than Actinic? With that in mind would/could it not be sensible to have written some sort of html entry checking code into those fields so that at least it makes sure the customer enters a string with the very minimum of *.@.*.*?
At this point I must point out we are only using the Catalog version of the product not the Business version. In a perfect world each customer would have to validate their own email address before they can submit their first order. I'm guessing each customer would then have to create an account before that could be done. Not sure some of our customers want to have to register everytime they wish to order from a site like ours. Some have said it's good that they do not have to create an account.
So
1) is email address validation available in any version of Actinic 7.*?
2) is there a way to produce a report in Actinic to output email addresses to a flat file?
3) Will there ever be the functionality in current or future versions of Actinic where you can create a single email and then send to all or a subset of the customers?
For the time being I have written a script to export the data out of the database, excluding duplicates and invalid formats (i.e. without an @ in the string) and finally output the result into a file that can be copied and pasted in to "To:" field in a mail client. All in all alot of work for something that surely alot of customers woudl like to see in the Actinic product?
Feedback and comments would be appreciated.
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