Understanding Design in Actinic: Part 2: - Finding the right layout

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There are a number of ways to select a layout to edit it:

1. If you know the name of the layout you can go to the 'Design' menu and select 'Library'. All layouts are listed by group in the 'Layouts' tab, so you can expand the relevant group (by clicking the '+') and locate the correct layout. You can also, use the 'Find' feature (click on the window and then right-click and select 'Find') in this window to search for layouts, or even code within a layout. Once you have found the right layout, double-click on it to edit it.
   
   
   
   
2. You can click on a particular area on the 'Preview Pane'. The area you have selected will be surrounded by a dashed line in the preview pane and will load the relevant layout into the 'Layout Code' window.
   
   
   
   Sometimes this is not quite the layout you need as the software will load the 'list' layout. List layouts are a bit special and you can find out more about them from the 'Help' menu (Help | Help Topics | Contents tab | The Design Tab | Help with Design | Advanced: Editing Lists). You can navigate around the layouts by using the 'navigation toolbar' on the preview pane itself or the one on the 'Layout Code' window.
   
   Use the 'Select Page Type' drop-down box to select specific page types (ie checkout pages, contact us page, search etc) and then you can click on the preview pane to load the layouts relevant to that particular page (for a description of each page type go to 'Help | Help Topics | Contents Tab | The Design Tab | Editing Other Actinic Pages' in the Actinic software).
   
   
   
   
3. On the 'Layout Code' window you may see 'layout selectors' (depicted in pink and underlined):
   
   
   You can double-click on these to take to into that particular layout. If this doesn't seem to work then it may be because the page you have highlighted in the Content Tree isn't using a feature that the layout relates to.
   
   To illustrate this point, if you are not using any of the 'Marketing' features in Actinic, then by double-clicking on the 'ProductAlsoBoughtList' layout variable on the product layout not do anything because there are no 'Also Bought' products set for the products on the current page or indeed, anywhere on the site.
   
   In this case, you can edit the layout via the Library or switch the feature on and select an 'Also Bought' item against at least one product on the page.
   
   
4. The 'Design Tree' gives a hierarchical view of the layouts used on the selected page. Highlighting a layout in the tree will load it into the 'Layout Code' window.
   
   
   
   = Layout
   = List Layout
   
   
5. Use the 'Layout Breadcrumb' trail - if you have already navigated to a particular layout (for example, the 'add to cart button' layout, the layout breadcrumb will list all the layouts 'above it' (or it's Parent layouts). Click on any of the layouts listed to load that layout, for example, to quickly get back to, say the 'Outer layout', just click on the first layout in the list.

Give some of these methods a go to see which way you prefer to find a particular layout.