PreviousTuesday 2 August 2005, 11:49 PM
Useful business features, awful website builder
From a developer's perspective: Actinic Catalog is hard not to recommend simply based on its price, but not so the bigger brother "Business" package. Yes the features are all there, but the presentation is sadly lacking. Basic content management is provided to allow store owners to update brochure pages, but many of the template features are not extended to the brochure end of the site and Javascript hacks are used to fill in the cracks. A Business website is essentially a Catalog website with all the static HTML pages mangled through a perl script to modify prices per-customer and so on. Rather inelegant, and it causes problems if you should find yourself wanting to hard-code links in your templates where Business itself doesn't provide any way to automatically generate these links for you.
The template system on the whole seems quite simplistic on the face of it, but unfortunately several (...hundred...) HTML snippets have been orphaned from the template system and now reside in a list elsewhere in the interface. If you should find yourself wanting to edit these chunks, you'll have to look through a lengthy appendix of a PDF guide just to identify what it is you're going to need to modify. Admittedly this is a better solution than earlier versions - where you'd have to start poking around in perl scripts to change fundamental elements like table widths - but it's not what you'd expect from a leading eCommerce package.
If you're at all interested in developing accessible websites, or you need a system that will provide a flexible framework for developing attractive websites, give this product a miss.
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