'Sort By' function for long section pages in Actinic - part 1

This is something I have just completed for MumStuff and it works a treat! There were lots of little quirks within Actinic that had to be overcome and I thought I'd share how I achieved it. I'm also making the javascript functions available for free, but I'm not offering any guarantees that they will work with your site, so be prepared to tinker if that's your thing!

So, to start with, you can download the javascript file here: download
This contains lots of comments that hopefully start to explain how it works. I'll post Part 2 soon with some more details as to how to set up Actinic.

ActiveDoc progress

ActiveDoc, the new tool for generating a printable brochure of your Actinic products, is currently under beta testing and will soon be ready to go. Like ActiveStock, it will be licensed on a one copy per website basis and pricing will be a once-only affordable payment.

A new feature that will be incorporated prior to release is an image checking service. This will read all the image filenames and paths from your Actinic database and check that these actually exist on your PC's file system. It will output the results into a text file for you to examine and take any actions, if necessary.

Actinic User Conference 14th October 2009 - review

Lots of interesting chatter on Actinic Community, blogs, Twitter, etc. about the conference on Wednesday.

It was a useful day and I'm sure every attendee came away with plenty to think about. I was a late call-up to the Customer Panel and was only too happy to talk about how we've used Actinic as MumStuff.co.uk has grown up (with my wife's permission, of course!!).

Most of the chat has centred around the new features list for V10. Obviously, the real time stock control is of interest to me as it performs essentially the same function as ActiveStock. However, I have yet to have it confirmed that the option to allocate stock to PSP-Pending orders or not has been included. This is something that ActiveStock customers requested early on in its development and something I put a lot of effort into solving.

The Feefo review partnership has also caused a lot of discussion. We implemented Soapbox reviews from Codepath last year and have been very happy with it - we're convinced customer reviews increase conversions and generally add to the look and feel of the site. Whether a truly independent 3rd party review database is what merchants really want, I'm not so sure - we'll have to wait and see.

For plug-in developers, I'm sure the announcement about the API was good to hear. But it's very early days and there's no real indication as to what format it will take - just an interface to the Access database or integration into the core Actinic user interface?

In the customer panel I was asked about E-mail newsletter software and recommended Tecmail from Teclan. Its integration with Actinic was the main reason we went with it on MumStuff and it works well - you can find it here: http://www.teclan.com/acatalog/E-Marketing.html

Finally, I had a number of interesting conversations (I guess that's the main point of these conferences!) and these certainly influenced where I might be focusing my attention next:

• ActiveDoc (the brochure creation tool) gained quite a bit of interest so I'll get that completed asap
• Using Excel for custom invoices - something we do at MumStuff but I hadn't yet considered it as an 'ActiveStock' product, but I will do now
• A few other ideas that I'll progress when I can

As always, please get in touch if you'd like to discuss any of my products, custom development or business services.

Actinic User Conference 14th Oct 2009

Looking forward to this as it will be a chance to put some faces to names. I've also been asked to sit on the Customer Panel (representing mumstuff.co.uk) to answer some questions about how Actinic has been put to good use on that site. If I don't get a chance to fully answer some questions, I'll post some info here after the event.