Product Reviews

Actinic, well known for its 'Web shop in a box' product Catalog, has been hard at work with new releases of Business and Link for Sage Line 50. Actinic Developer, a new addition to this expanding range, supposedly gives the Web site developer the ability to design Actinic sites with ease. The idea is that developers are able to build themes that can then be applied to Actinic Business for generating an online store. And once a site has been designed and uploaded, the designer can then sell their client a low-cost version of Actinic Business to manage the site.

One of the problems with the Actinic range is the inherent difficulty in changing the supplied templates to alter overall design. This has seen great improvement in the latest versions of the programs but, with Developer, Actinic has taken a leap forward by including an extension for Macromedia Dreamweaver. Using this extension, you're able to examine the pages generated by Actinic Business in the preview mode and see which bit of the page is generated by which code section of a template. You can then open up this code and edit it to immediately see the result of your changes, all within the Dreamweaver design environment. It still requires a high degree of HTML knowledge, but it's a step towards getting those pages exactly how you want them. Small changes to fonts, alignment and so on can be made so easily using this extension that it alone almost justifies the cost of the whole product.

Actinic Developer also allows you to design your own templates, which can then be applied to an Actinic Business site. This process isn't simple though, as you need to create new graphics for the theme, the buttons, logos and so on, all with the correct filenames. You're then able to convert these graphics to a format so that Actinic will allow you to change the colours, just as you can do with the supplied themes. This is

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done by running a supplied program over them cryptically called actcbnmaker.exe. When asked what CBN stood for, Actinic revealed that it was Colour By Numbers.

Next, you need to alter the primary layout template. You can do this in Dreamweaver, and once you've finished you have to make sure the correct Actinic Variables are in the right places in your layout. This requires careful following of the instructions, which needless to say Actinic supplies, and, if you follow them, all seems to work fine. It's not that easy a task yet, though, but no doubt it will be improved upon in later versions. That said, we're talking about a product aimed at developers and not a quick Web site solution, so the complexity of this area is permissible in the first version of the program.

Actinic Developer is aimed squarely at the Web designer who intends to create more than one Web site using Actinic. The licence key allows you to develop as many sites as you wish, and the pricing reflects this - it's a bit of overkill for just one site. However, the ability for the designer to supply their client with Actinic Order Manager for a small licensing fee makes for some interesting marketing opportunities.

It's a shame that Order Manager doesn't allow any uploading by the client. I would have preferred to also see a 'cut-down' version of Business that allows the client to update prices, special offers, their brochure pages and so on, but with the ability to change the design, ISP and payment provider settings disabled. This way, a client can be 'let loose' to maintain the Web site you've designed, safe in the knowledge that there's little they can 'break'. Clients often want to maintain their Web site themselves. If Actinic offered this 'safe' version of Business as an enhancement to Actinic Developer, it would have 'built a better mouse trap'. This is especially poignant as Actinic Business/Developer can also be used to build non e-commerce sites with its 'brochure' section, which allows the generation of plain HTML pages from data entered into the Actinic database.

Actinic Developer is a great step forward and definitely worth a look - not because it's easy to use or cheap, but because it offers a business opportunity for small designers to offer professional-looking e-commerce sites to companies that would normally be unable to afford to have such a thing designed. In these times of post dotcom bubble, it will help to breathe some life back into the industry.