Actinic Catalog 4 review

Cataloguing your products

Once you've got the basics of how you do business, it's time to add the products to the catalogue. You can import a file of existing items if you have one, complete with departments or sections if required. Each section can have its own look and feel, with options for layout being chosen from a pre-designed list of eight formats. For example, you can have product-descriptive text down the left-hand side of the item image, or the right, or centred, or no picture at all if you like. You can also browse for your own defined section layout template.

Each item has the usual fields to fill, such as a short name, a longer description, the price and whether the item is taxed or not. You can set stock levels for automatic monitoring, such as the minimum stock level that will illicit a warning, and you can set the quantity of items in stock below which to suspend ordering on the Web site.

New product features in this version include some interesting enhancements to item attributes. First, you can choose to create item 'components'; these could be used where the product is an assembly of other products, for example. Each component represents one sub-assembly, and can have its own attributes and choices. More importantly, each sub-assembly can be associated with another product in the Catalog using what Actinic calls 'permutations'. However, attributes can still be used for simple choices such as colour, type, style, quantity or size.

Using a combination of components and attributes, you can arrive at choices for a product that define a pricing for each item, based on a standard price, the sum of its components, or both added together. Again flexibility comes at a price in terms of ease of use and the length of time required to implement your stock list, but even so, this is a very flexible way to alter the final cost according to the options chosen.

Looking good

Once the shop and product catalogue are ready to go, it's time to decide how your Web shop should look, and thankfully this latest version of Actinic Catalog arrives with far more design themes to choose from. There are 26 pre-defined layouts and over 50 colour palette options to choose from. You can also insert raw HTML into most text fields and edit the colour for backgrounds, buttons, text and so on.

Custom options can be created and linked to external HTML files for more drastic alterations in design, and these additions are included in your site via the comprehensive template editor. Here you can get at the Actinic Catalog templates used to parse your shop details and create the resulting Web site - just about anything is possible for those with a little programming experience.

When everything is in place all you need to do is preview your site on the local PC to see if it looks how you expect, publish to the Web and you're in business. Your ISP host server doesn't have to be very large - provided you have writeable access to the CGI-bin folder for the Actinic scripts to reside and the latest version of Perl is installed, all should be well. Unless you buy Actinic Catalog from your ISP, then you'll need to get involved in the network upload settings, but Actinic supplies a ready-made template with setup details for many ISPs.

Actinic Catalog was already looking like the e-commerce software to beat in the off-line catalogue builder genre, and now it looks even better. The cost is about right for the features on offer for the end user. A special licence to manufacture multiple shops at a reduced rate would be very welcome for the developer though. The fact that the merchant must have a copy of Actinic Catalog to download and process orders also limits Web-designer appeal.