Sorry if I'm a little off-topic. I presume there are still plenty of 4.3 sites out there that are doing active development like we are, and would like some feedback. We don't seem to have a place for it in the 4.3 area.
http://www.asa2fly.com has been live for about 9 months on ASP3/MSSQL, and is currently dealing 100K page views and 20Gb a month. Although there's been some customization, the original DB schema, the Admin section, and app headers and footers remain pristine, i.e. we've been "polite".
The most significant change is that, with the exception of index.asp, the entire website is data-driven using the standard Able DB. The e-store is just a subset of the website. Virtually everything you see is soft-coded. This allows for consistent website maintenance by the customer, consistent appearance and user navigation, and integrated full-site search capability to name some advantages.
Another major aspect is that the website ties into the accounting and shipping departments. Sales info flows to order entry and inventory on demand, and shipping status/tracking numbers flow back to the website.
ASA has an art department, and one individual who is fairly comfortable with HTML, but no ASP programmers on board. The website is very stable, ASA's regular staff maintains the site day-to-day, and programmer intervention is rarely required.
The website is considered a work-in-process, i.e. it's still short a couple hundred images, and some content is a little rough or even missing, but the main thing is that the customer knows this, they can do this work themselves, and do it when they have the time. Appearance-wise, the customer leans toward austere tastes, which is their prerogative, and over which they have total control via some specialized includes and CSS.
Some things I'd like to know:
* We're currently working on some capabilities that are similar to offerings in 5.2, such as "activated soft products", couponing, and some CRM. If we upgraded to 5.x, we would probably have to heavily modify the standard code to conform to products that are already in the field, in addition to the way ASA does business. Does anyone have experience working with these areas in 5.2 that can report how easy they are to work with and modify?
* In an upgrade, we would need to preserve much of our custom 4.3 code. Assuming we've been friendly to Able standards (at least according to the 1.0 tech docs), how easy is it to upgrade a custom 4.3 site to 5.X? And why should we?
* There is a continuing debate at ASA on breadth vs depth organization of products. Some would rather drill down to a small collection of products by additional navigation choices before seeing products, while others say this is too confusing, and would rather have little navigation lead to a wide swath of products. We are currently "depth-oriented". Comments?
* We're especially interested in ease-of-use issues, and would appreciate any comments or suggestions in this area.
Thanks,
Chris