Suggested New Articles for KB

[pinbrook]

V8 - Section Lists get duplicated

When you get 2 section lists showing which you can trace to the code as being

SubSectionListTop
SubSectionListBottom



This can be set in Site options | Layout, under Section.... you need to set 'Bottom Subsection List Layout' to 'No Layout' and make sure in the code, on clicking Edit Appearance , Fixed Layout is set to No(), akin to , Use Parent.

[Mike Hughes]

And while you're at it, go and put all the old KB articles in there too. Often in this forum a search will bring up a link saying " its in the KB here.." only that KB article no longer exists.

Mike

[gabrielcrowe]

symbols and strange characters in your product description?

use the numbers on this page:
http://cedesign.net/asciij.htm

and this one:
http://www.dragonwinds.com/resources/html-codes.shtml

to insert symbols in standrds compliant markup like this:

!!<&copy;>!!

for a copyright symbol, in this example.

[Bruce]

And while you're at it, go and put all the old KB articles in there too. Often in this forum a search will bring up a link saying " its in the KB here.." only that KB article no longer exists.

All the articles are still there in the knowledge base, its the path that has changed, I had posted this up when it was done initially... If you come across a path that does not work then delete the folder references so that it reads like

http://knowledge.actinic.com/acatalog/.........
Not
http://knowledge.actinic.com/kadmin/users/acatalog/.........

Kind regards,

[Mike Hughes]

Hi Bruce,

In which case perhaps a little apache redirect might be in order? No-one looking in the forum for advice is going to know that they have to manually correct the links to the knowledge base.

Mike

[Bruce]

Yep, I will put something in place.

Kind regards,

[pinbrook]

How to embed an SWF file into a fragment

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,29,0" width="140" height="140" >
  <param name="movie" value="http://www.mydomain.co.uk/acatalog/myswf.swf">
  <param name="quality" value="high">
  <embed src="http://www.mydomain.co.uk/acatalog/myswf.swf" width="140" height="140" align="top" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>
</object>

Make the appropriate changes to

http://www.mydomain.co.uk/acatalog/myswf.swf

and wrap the entire code in the usual !!<place code here>!!

[Duncan Rounding]

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,29,0" width="140" height="140" >
  <param name="movie" value="http://www.mydomain.co.uk/acatalog/myswf.swf">
  <param name="quality" value="high">
  <embed src="http://www.mydomain.co.uk/acatalog/myswf.swf" width="140" height="140" align="top" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>
</object>

Make the appropriate changes to

http://www.mydomain.co.uk/acatalog/myswf.swf

and wrap the entire code in the usual !!<place code here>!!

As Mark Hall kindly pointed out in another thread there is another method of inserting flash using swfobject which has advantages over the original Macromedia method above. See the Adobe website or the developers blog for instructions on usage for this:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/ar...swfobject.html
http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/

PS - I think we should leave the 'content' posts in this thread, otherwise we won't know what's already been added - per the AUG thread perhaps.

[pinbrook]

Error in File C:\....\Orders.rpt:Request cancelled by the user

Error in File C:\Program Files\Actinic Ecommerce v6\Orders.rpt:
Request cancelled by the user.

This means that your printer is invalid, and to fix it you have to go to the print setttings for that report in Actinic (so go as if to print it, then click on print setup on the printer dialog that pops up and then print it to save the changed settings).

[leehack]

DESIGN | TEXT is another very popular issue, with most people not knowing about it. Or is it that they take a look and run a mile - not sure. Whatever, i think a nice guide explaining text on site is often in there, would help.

[pinbrook]

£ pound symbol shows as a square

Several potential solutions to check:

1 The problem is that your webserver is using 'Unicode' (UTF) as the default character set, but it should be using ISO. You need to ask your web host to edit the web server config file for your Apache server and change:

AddDefaultCharset UTF8
to
AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1

2 Place the following in the <head> of your overall layout

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

3 Altering Special Character Encoding

Switch to the 'Design' tab and click on any price shown in the 'Page Preview' pane.
This should highlight a variable (written in light blue and underlined) in the 'Layout Code' pane called 'TaxInclusivePrice'.
Double-click this variable to open the variable editor.
On the row called 'Encoding' click in the white box then select 'HTML' from the drop-down box.
Click 'OK'. You should see another variable called 'TaxInclusivePriceAlt' which will need the same setting altered.
Upload the site

4 create a PHP function to replace the pound symbol with the html equivalent and then modifying the price layout to use the new php function.. i.e.:

insert new function into c:\program files\actinic v8\actinic_main.php:

function priceformat($sFormat, $sPrice, $sPriceAlt)
{
    echo str_replace("£","£",sprintf($sFormat, $sPrice, $sPriceAlt));
} 

then modify the "Product Price Including VAT" layout

priceformat("<actinic:variable name="SecondCurrencyFormat" />","<actinic:variable name="TaxInclusivePrice" />", "<actinic:variable name="TaxInclusivePriceAlt" />");

5 DB solution

in my original query I stated I have to use UTF-8 encoding as my products can have some very strange accented characters in their names. Even if this were not the case though, there are extremly good arguments in general for software to fully support UTF-8 as it is a genius form of encoding - it encompasses all the (regular) ascii characters, and collates them as expected, and it allows for (almost) all the unicode characters - all without leaving any nulls in text strings - brilliant! and all composed on the back of a napkin (just like tcp, http and all the best ideas).

IDEALLY, what I needed to do was, in the ActinicCatalogue database, currency table, SCURRENCY field for Pounds Sterling replace the ISO-8859-1 character 163, which displays as the pound sterling symbol in all single byte (ascii) encodings, with a completly generic html entity (& pound or (& # 163 but niether of these were possible as the field width was too short! (don't mention extending it - price display is then broken completly).

So - a non ideal solution (cos it ain't generic) was to get the actual UTF-8 2 byte sequence 194, 163 into this field... To do this I had to grab the ascii characters at 194 and 163 from the windows font selector and drop them into the DB field using Access, and believe it or not it has worked!

[pinbrook]

DESIGN | TEXT is another very popular issue, with most people not knowing about it. Or is it that they take a look and run a mile - not sure. Whatever, i think a nice guide explaining text on site is often in there, would help.

hopefully Bruce/ChrisD will oblige

[pinbrook]

How to hide the Quantity Box

replace <input type="text" with <input type="hidden" on the product layout

[pinbrook]

V8 - How to add a blockif condition &quot;contains&quot; or &quot;starts with&quot;

contains

<actinic:block if="false%20%21%3d%3d%20stristr%28%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22ProductDescription%22%20%2f%3e,%20%22love%22%29" >
	<br/><b>Lovely product (contains love).</b><br/>
</actinic:block>

starts with

<actinic:block if="0%20%3d%3d%3d%20strpos%28%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22ProductDescription%22%20%2f%3e,%20%22Jane%22%29" >
	<br/><b>Written by a Jane (starts with Jane).</b><br/>
</actinic:block>

Explanation by Zoltan - The conditions are evaluated by the built in PHP engine. It was the primary reason of the integration not the fancy PHP blocks what is basicaly a side product. :-) It means that you can use any PHP functions in the conditions. Therefore both of the requested conditions can be done easily. There are a few PHP functions which can be used here. The below examples are using stripos for case sensitive comparison. You can also use strpos for non case sensitive and some other functions like strstr and stristr. See PHP documentation for more. This solution is PHP4

[pinbrook]

Change the name of an external design

Useful if you'd allowed the default name "external Design" and what to call it something meaningful

Go into the Library, and in the Layouts tab locate the 'Web Page Outer Layout' group.

Your 'ExternalDesign' layout will be in that group. You should be able to rename it there (as long as the layout is not selected in 'Settings | Site Options' or in any of the sections in your store. You can rename a layout by clicking the 'Edit Layout Details' button.

You can also delete it from here - although Delete will be greyed out of the right-click menu if the layout is used anywhere.