Affino Beta Labs - Structure Copy

Something we’ve always wanted to do is to give website editors the ability to create sites faster. We’ve introduced a number of enhancements over the past couple of years to make this possible including: the new Design Centre for faster and easier page design; Smart Copy for creating new designs from existing ones; the Application Bar to provide you with instant access to all the key content, design elements and settings for each page; the improved Live Editor and media handling; Live Design for tweaking designs right from the live page and now we’re introducing Structure Copy.

Structure Copy which is out in the next Affino release (5.5.16) lets you do just that. You select the site / part of an existing site (within your Affino instance) that you want to copy, say where you want the copy to go and then tweak the key settings for the new Channels and Sections you will be creating. See the screen above. It’s not the prettiest user interface we’ve created but it does a great job.

The whole process takes just a couple of minutes. When you push the Copy button Affino creates the new site structure for you.

I went through the process this morning and created a new Video Store site on Comrz and the whole process took around 15 minutes.

Firstly when I created the Site (Zone) I selected the same user directory as is on Comrz.com with a unified login. This means that I don’t ever have to log into the new site. I also selected to use the same Store Profile on the new site It means that whilst I have a independent product catalogue running on the Video Store, I have not had to do any work in setting up the store. In practice if this was a production site I would have needed create a new Store profile since Payment Gateways are very specific about the URLs the work on.

What sets apart the process from most site copying tools is that I was able to specify a number of elements which are going to be massive time savers moving ahead. I was able to create a new store and community in minutes and then able to evolve it rapidly. I can also always copy other bits of existing sites as the need arises, say append the whole structure for a store to an existing site I’m running.

What does it mean in terms of time, well, I created a new site to test out the Affino My Store capabilities earlier in the year and it took 6 hours, creating the Video Store took 15 minutes including creating a new skin (page design) for the Video Store and re-purposing a skin I created for the My Store. A year ago the same process would have taken me a day and two years ago it would have taken me two to three days.

What this means for companies creating multiple sites, such as agencies, publishers, brand owners and aggregators, multi-sector organisations and companies targeting multiple localised markets, is that Affino is now an immensely productive tool for doing this.