developer or catalog

[life jacket]

Hi

We are stuck as to whether to go for three new independent calalog stores or one version of developer for the three sites. I kind of like the idea of having three independent sites on three machines rather than all my eggs in one basket, pcs have a habit of dying around here!

Any ideas appreciated.

[NormanRouxel]

It's really easy to backup an entire Actinic site, so I'd recommend Developer and regular snapshot type backups (which are a good idea anyway).

If you then keep a copy of developer dormant (or ready to install) on a spare system you'd be back up and running should disaster strike.

You could even arrange for the snapshots to be made onto a networked system so there would be no CD shuffling and backup would be very quick.

[Jan]

If you buy developer then you can add more stores if you want to at a later date, maintenance is easier because you only have to upgrade one Actinic. There are also cost implications because you only have to purchase a single copy of cover for developer rather than three copies of cover for catalog. The disadvantage is that all of your sites will be on the same machine and so you will be have to switch from site to site to process orders. We have some nice tools to help with that though, our automation mole has a multisite module that will switch sites for you and collect and process orders on each site in turn and our mutiuser batch order processing program makes it really easy to switch from site to site.

If you buy three developers then you can have them on three machines which makes it easier (so long as you can dance from machine to machine quickly enough :-)) to process orders as you can see all three sites at once but you will then have to buy three copies of cover or three upgrades to keep them up to date and you are limited to just those three stores. You also will not get the advanced features that you get in developer.

If it was me I would go for a single copy of developer and keep a spare machine upto date so that you can just swap over to it quickly if required. As Norman said you can use snapshots to do this but we also have a free actinic database backup program in our free plugin library that will backup your actinic database.

We have had a lot of problems with our websites over the last few days but are just getting back to normal (thanks to help from Jo at Pinbrook) so if you have any problems trying to access our site please call us on 01395 239 348.

Regards