Sure, you want AcuWeb because it gives you a web booking engine out of the box for your shiny new installation of Acumen 9. But did you know it gives you as many web booking engines as you want? No? Well it does.
When you sign up for AcuWeb you are given an alias. It’s nothing fancy, it’s just a way the system identifies a particular data set, or Acumen 9 installation (or Mercury installation for that matter). As a customer you can have actually have more than one Acumen and/or Mercury installation at the same time, which is really nice when you decide it’s time to try out the new system. It’s also handy if you have multiple parks that you want to keep completely separate. Because AcuWeb & Mercury are both SaaS, you can have additional installations easily.
That’s not what this post is about though. What’s special about AcuWeb isn’t it’s ability to let you administer multiple installation (though it’s pretty cool), it’s what you can do with each installation that’s really impressive.
Everything in AcuWeb is configurable, that includes the look and feel (often called a theme) which is controlled using a custom (and powerful) templating system. It also includes tons of options to do with everything in the booking engine. All that configuration is grouped together in something called an Option Set.
The good news is you can have multiple Option Sets for each alias (most customers will only have one alias). The Option Sets can be completely different, but even better, they can inherit large proportions of themselves from other Option Sets!
This means you can happily clone your live web site option set, and start playing with it, without risking your live web site. When you’re happy you can overwrite the live Option Set with your test one.
That’s not the only use of course. If you have multiple brands of web site, but want to use the same underlying data from Acumen (or Mercury), then you just create an Option Set for each brand.
Or you can have different Option Set’s for each language that you publish your site in – how many of you expected multi-lingual functionality out of the box?
There’s really a ton of uses of Option Sets, and we hope you’ll enjoy playing with them when you upgrade to AcuWeb, as they allow you to experiment with confidence. You can quickly see the results of an option set by clicking the link in the configuration page to open a new window using the new Option Set. Don’t worry if it’s all broken, because you can carry on editing it in you current window and fixing any problems as you see them.
Again, don’t be shy in posting comments and letting us know what you think!