Questions on multiple shops with Actinic Developer

[Duncan Rounding]

My appologies if these questions are obvious.

I am considering purchasing Actinic Developer. I want to develop at least three or four shops for my own use. I am unsure/unclear how Developer handles multiple shops.

I have downloaded the demo and the facilities and flexibility look ideal but I would like clarification on the following:

1. Can I develop all these shops and maintain them with the same Actinic licence on the same PC? How would I swop between shops in Actinic for developing and operating?

2. If I use 1and1 Linux Bus Pro hosting can I load all my shops in the same hosting package? Would they be completely independant? How or would the orders etc be segregated?

3. I travel frequently and would like to also load Developer onto my laptop to be able continue developing whilst I'm away, then when I return I would want to place the 'developed' work onto my main PC. Is this possible? Am I licenced with Developer to do that?

4. Template designs - are they independant and per site - i.e. if I changed a template for one shop would it affect anything in Developer that would influence other shops? Are the templates 'reset to standard' again if I started to develop another shop?

5. If in the future I upgraded my Developer software to perhaps Actinic 8 or even just to 7.3 say would I have to redo my template changes? How would this influence normal shop operations?

Thanks in advance.

Duncan Rounding

[Jan]

1. Can I develop all these shops and maintain them with the same Actinic licence on the same PC? How would I swop between shops in Actinic for developing and operating?

Yes, you just change to the site that you want to use, you can not swap detween developing and operating, but you can make a copy of a shop using snapshot and work on it then. You can only use one shop at a time.

2. If I use 1and1 Linux Bus Pro hosting can I load all my shops in the same hosting package? Would they be completely independant? How or would the orders etc be segregated?

You can host several shops on a single domain, there is a field called script id number in the network settings dialog, set this to a unique number for each shop.

3. I travel frequently and would like to also load Developer onto my laptop to be able continue developing whilst I'm away, then when I return I would want to place the 'developed' work onto my main PC. Is this possible? Am I licenced with Developer to do that?

You would need to get permission from Actinic to do this I think - I might be wrong though.

4. Template designs - are they independant and per site - i.e. if I changed a template for one shop would it affect anything in Developer that would influence other shops? Are the templates 'reset to standard' again if I started to develop another shop?

Each site is completely independant.

5. If in the future I upgraded my Developer software to perhaps Actinic 8 or even just to 7.3 say would I have to redo my template changes? How would this influence normal shop operations?

You shouldn't have to upgrade templates for a minor upgrade but will probably have to do so for a major upgrade. When you install a new major version, you can upgrade your existing sites, it will leave your V7 sites in place for normal business. You can then switch your V8 sites into test mode and develop (including uploading your website) without effecting your main sites.

Regards,

[Duncan Rounding]

Thanks very much for your response Jan.

Just to make sure I fully understand regarding the multiple operations-

To, for example, download orders from one site and then download orders from another site I would have to import the snapshot for the relevant sites first?

Duncan

[I-CC]

Developers multiple site ability is controlled within the software independantly, which within a licensed copy, you would go into File | Sites and then you will be able to license and switch between sites.

So if we assume that you have created each of your sites that your develop and operate yourself within the software, when you launch the software it will open up with the last site that you worked on/within before you last closed it down.

You then do an order download or make changes in it, and then update.

To then work on another site or to download orders for another site, you go into File | Sites and select the other site from your list of ones you have created, which then switches it all over to that site, where you then download your orders as before, and make any changes.... So, in effect you would not need to import and export snapshots to work within the software on a single PC for multiple sites under developer, you simply File | Sites and switch between them as you need...

All the best...

[pinbrook]

As Techno says each site is a completely separate entity. Thus you swap from site to site within the file menu - the result on your PC will be as many folders containing each site info as you have sites. ie you have five sites you will have Site1, Site2, Site3, Site4, Site5 etc

The same then follows to the webserver, if each site is hosted within its own domain then it will be separate from the other sites. You swap sites from the file menu to work with the site you want to upload or download.

When you are travelling you have the choice of either taking a snapshot of one site assuming you only want to work on one site, or you take the whole Actinic folder which contains all the site folders.

I can't see any reason why you wouldn't be licensened for this.

[Duncan Rounding]

Thanks very much for the clarificaions.
This info wasn't clear in the sales literature.

Duncan

[afm]

Does anyone know whether switching between sites in that way will cause a web update to behave like a web refresh?

It seems to happen to me that way! And as I have quite a large number of images it gets a bit slow.

I'm assuming that when you switch from site a to site b and do some work, then switch back to site a, Actinic should know that you haven't changed anything in site a.

Is that right? I'm about to launch my second site for this weekend and I don't fancy a long upload on the main site if I change a couple of small items.

[I-CC]

Switching between a and b should not require full refreshes when you switch back, as it will know that you have not done any changes in a, whilst you might have completely overhauled site b.