Actinic Business 5

Actinic Catalog and Business 5 are the latest incarnations of the popular 'shop in a box' software. They not only enable you to set up an e-commerce shop easily without any HTML or programming skills, but more importantly will allow you to process the flood of orders that you hopefully will receive from your online shop.

I've been using Actinic Catalog in anger on a live site since version 3 and, although version 4 offered improvements, the problems involved in upgrading an existing customised site to version 4 meant I for one baulked at the task. The upgrade process meant you had to go through your site and reapply all the changes you'd made to the supplied templates - an onerous task not helped by the difficulty in finding the correct template.

To its credit, Actinic took these criticisms on board and has done a lot of work trying to fix them. If you thought that there were few worthwhile improvements between version 3 and 4, prepare to be pleasantly surprised by version 5. There's been an enormous amount of work done, certainly helped by Actinic having a much larger programming team than before.

There are significant changes to almost all areas, except the server-side code, which has been kept almost the same, running as it does in Perl. Before we look at the new features, let's deal with the install routine and, unfortunately, the first brickbat. During installation, the program asks if you wish to upgrade an existing site. I selected this and all seemed to be fine, the program keeping the old installation intact and installing into a new folder.

However, the conversion of the site is actually done the first time you run the application. When this was done there were a couple of error screens and, after clicking through these, I was eventually presented with my data and all my configuration settings successfully imported into the new Actinic Business database.

Feeling brave, I asked the application for a preview and was disappointed to be presented with a browser window with a chunk of broken code in it. Now, to be fair, this import routine does work with many version 3 and 4 sites and, if you're one of the lucky ones, you'll only have a small amount of work to get yourself up and running. In fact, after studying the files I sent it, Actinic came back with a solution that involved some code copy and pasting, which seemed to fix things and I was able to preview my old site as it should look, but under version 5.

In many cases, as there's so much new with this version, you'll wish to use the opportunity to sort out the design and redo things. Whereas before, with version 4, you were presented with the Herculean task of redoing all your changes, version 5 offers several improvements to make this task a lot easier. It's fair to say that this is, and always will be, a job for the developer or serious user and not for the casual user. However, if you're serious about your online presence, then some degree of customisation of the wide range of supplied templates is required.

Previously, it was difficult to find the right template to edit and, while Actinic has kept the old user interface, it's added a new graphical interface where you can preview the page. As you move over elements on the page they light up; if you then click on an element, the code for that template is opened up in Notepad for you to edit and resave. While you still have to know your way around HTML to customise it this far, the improvement to this process in version 5 is, in my opinion, worth the upgrade alone. Having said that, this level of customisation may not be necessary for many customers, as the themes supplied have both increased in number and been enhanced in quality; every theme is easily customisable, with colours and images being changed through simple dialog boxes. When setting up Actinic on a machine you can decide if the user can alter the catalogue items, handle orders and know whether they're able to alter the design of the site. This stops accidental changes being made by inexperienced operators.