A few post-live considerations for AC7 development

[AbleMods]

Thought I'd drop a few notes on my post-live experience with AC7.

1. Moving your SQL database back and forth between development and live is a real pain. The site URL and SSL paths are in the database and you have to manually modify the SQL table to fix it. There's gotta be an easier way. Make it override those fields if it detects localhost or a private ip block or something. I'd use the data import utility, but Sahib said it would be safer to continue doing backup/restores.

2. Deleting a category with products in it will not delete the products. They just orphan. You can delete them one-at-a-time via AC7, but there needs to be a better way. I did alot of testing by uploading many products into a single category and checking them out. If the upload wasn't what I wanted, I just deleted the category assuming all the products would get nuked. I assumed wrong.

3. Order Summary page is acting weird. A customer bought one $12 item. Order summary shows he had an order total of $12 AND a credit balance of $12. Payment history showed a $12 authorization and a $12 payment with a zero balance remaining. PayPal only shows $12 received from the customer. AC7 is duplicating the payment amount, but it appears to be a display issue.

4. Order Status and Shipment Status are confusing to me. Having the option to change order status to shipped and having a shipping status that also says shipped just muddles things to me. Keep shipping-related info in one column. Keep order, payment and problems in order status. Change the order status "Shipped" to "Completed" or "Finished". I'll test around doing that on my site and see how it works.

5. Work your butts off on that data import utility. You've got a great start but it needs alot more love. ANYTHING you can do to make migration from a competiting product to yours is money in the bank. As it is now, products import just barely does the trick. Users and Orders import are useless until they're more robust.

6. Put that error log in a panel on the admin dashboard. Don't hide the fact the site has errors with some tiny link buried in alerts. Do it like the Recent Orders i.e. Recent Log Errors.

7. Product Reviews can only be turned off or on site-wide, yet there's a field for it in ac_Products. Was leaving it off the Product edit screen intentional?

8. Email lists is nice and handy, but it needs a separate set of email templates from the orders templates. Mixing all my marketing email templates in with all the store-trigger templates is cumbersome.

9. Reports need alot of love. I need Master lists. For everything. Products, categories, templates, customers, users, templates etc. There's 124 tables and only 14 reports.

10. Tax report need a date range criteria. I can't see what my tax obligation is for a specific month.

Most importantly...

Please fix that html editor soon. You can't upload images. It shows weird foreign language in the preview when you insert an image. Working with tables is, well, worthless. If the editor can't build at least a basic web page with some tables and images, get rid of it. Every single piece of content I've created in AC7 had to be done outside of AC7. Your design concept of content, layout, sidebar etc is incredibly powerful. But it's usefulness is seriously diminished until an effective way to edit the content inside AC7 exists. I don't want to manually edit HTML for even the smallest page changes.