Upgrading to v8

[cdicken]

In the spirit of jumping in feet first I have upgraded my site to V8

This is cool, but please remember that the idea of a beta program is to test new features, and it shouldn't be used to upgrade a live business yet. There are going to be upgrade issues in the field that we will find during the beta program and fix within Actinic before we encourage live stores to upgrade.

Normans Multi Info add-on does not work with V8

This is going to be a Perl change, and it probably will be necessary to re-apply all perl patches to the v8 perl scripts. This has always been the case with upgrading.

I cannot see how to easily change the text properties - editing the css file in DW is a big job with all the extra bits in there.

Try changing the values in 'Settings | Site Options | General' - you can set the font sizes in there. At the moment it uses pixels - but you can change this to relative sizes.

I registered a design with Actinic and all seemed ok but there does not seem to be a way of passing the template back and forth between DW and Actinic as can be done with V7.

Once you register a design with Actinic, you can continue to make changes in DW, and Actinic will be updated - and any change you make to the outer page layout in Actinic will affect DW. It's a 2-way interface. With regards to the crashes, please report these to v8beta@actinic.co.uk.

V8 has overwritten all my V7 css files

In your v7 site one folder or on the website?

Fixed it by deleting the css file from the server and refreshing V7, but on trying to upload V8 again Im getting an error saying the css link is corrupt. Also an error saying every image is duplicated and V8 will not load at all

Please report these issues to v8beta@actinic.co.uk.

It gets worse ALL my page titles are now missing

Please report this to v8beta@actinic.co.uk

If this is true, and I suspect it is, then V8 is a step backwards One of the best features of Actinic is (was) its integration with DW and why Actinic would force us to use an html editor is beyond me - I for one will NOT take the step back.

They have, I think, tried to produce a "design" capability within Actinic and removed the Template manager/DW capability - this is fatally flawed as most designers use DW etc not notepad.

Sorry Malcolm, but I don't understand this. You can manage your overall page layout (v8 equivalent of a primary template) completely in Dreamweaver and then Actinic will insert all the products and sections into it. Are you talking about how you could edit the Act_ProductLine.html etc. templates in Dreamweaver? You couldn't edit those visually anyway as they looked a mess in DW. Could you clarify please?

[pinbrook]

Ah now this is better, yes you can undock all the screen elements ie content view, page preview etc so I can have code on one screen and page preview on another.

But one of my monitors is 1024 the other is 1280, if I slide my page preview to the other bigger monitor I can't use all the screen. i'll draw a pic and attach it,

I can't get any actinic element to enter into the red rectangle, all other progs I use will maximise to use the whole of the 2nd monitor, if I try to drop page preview into the top of the monitor it just bounces back down to where the top of the element is in line with the top of monitor1

[cdicken]

Mark

I know it's very early days, but the lack of integration with DW (which has been improving to date) means that the two sites we are currently developing (and, I suspect, many of the great example sites which appear on Actinic's own site) couldn't be done in V8.........

Actinic has a much closer integration with DW than it ever has before. The DW integration before was just a glorified template editor which told you which template does what. Now you can actually create a completely customised primary template from scratch in DW and then register it with Actinic, and Actinic will then make the necessary changes to make the design work with Actinic. You can then slot in design elements from the Actinic menu and see the effect straight away within Actinic.

[cdicken]

I can't get any actinic element to enter into the red rectangle, all other progs I use will maximise to use the whole of the 2nd monitor, if I try to drop page preview into the top of the monitor it just bounces back down to where the top of the element is in line with the top of monitor1

Please report this to v8beta@actinic.co.uk.

[pinbrook]

I understand outer layout and inner layout...

I have quite got the hang of this bit yet though

I'm looking at executive theme, and for example I want to move the price from below the product name where it is left aligned to be over on the rifgt underneath add to cart, how do I do this.

My gut instinct is to go to the code which I can easily find by clicking on page preview and it highlights it for me in latyout code, and move the code in layout code- is this the easiest way?

[Mark H]

MarkActinic has a much closer integration with DW than it ever has before. The DW integration before was just a glorified template editor which told you which template does what. Now you can actually create a completely customised primary template from scratch in DW and then register it with Actinic, and Actinic will then make the necessary changes to make the design work with Actinic. You can then slot in design elements from the Actinic menu and see the effect straight away within Actinic.

Thanks Chris - we're getting conflicting views on the level of integration with DW this morning, so I for one will keep quiet for a while until the position is a lot clearer!

[cdicken]

George

Where did the NETQUOTE thingy's go? lol

The have now been replaced with variables. Read the beta testing guide for an introduction on these. They are much easier to use, and much more powerful.

Seriously, a lot of users will have the next/previous links added.

These should be upgraded automatically by the upgrader.

And the original brochure pages remain, even when changing theme after import.

Check the 'Layout' tab of the brochure pages. Make sure the 'Brochure Overall Layout' is set to 'Use Parent'.

First import of a snapshot? 102 errors.

Please report this to v8beta@actinic.co.uk. We can take a look at your snapshot and improve the upgrader in time for full release.

[cdicken]

until the position is a lot clearer!

Check out the beta testing guide - especially the last section on the DW integration. It'll explain how it all works.

[RuralWeb]

Yes when you install 8 it detects if you haw DW and asks if you want to install the DW Extension. This then appears as a tab in DW which controls the registering of the design and instertion of some Actinic variables.

The problem comes later when you wan to pass a design from Actinic to DW, there does not seem to be a way of doing it. Also if you make a change in the original design it says that the design is already registred and the box is greyed out. The user guide doe not cover this very well at all.

[cdicken]

OK Jont - your turn

Have registered this previously - apparently Actinic are working on this ... especially the actinic.css being made available.

Here's a quick workaround to make the actinic.css file external to Actinic.

Create a new blank file in your 'Site1' folder called 'custom.css' (or something).

Edit this file in Dreamweaver.

Go to 'Actinic | Import A Page Design From Actinic'.

Select 'Actinic Stylesheet' from the list and click 'Import'.

Delete the following two lines:
/*import theme-specific classes */
@import url("theme.css");

Save the file.

Now go to Actinic and in the 'Design' tab select 'Actinic Stylesheet' from the 'Select Page Type' window.

Underneath
@import url("theme.css");
add the following line:
@import url("custom.css");

You can now delete all the other classes in the layout.

You can now edit 'custom.css' in whatever file you want, and Actinic willl substitute all the variables.

All my CUSTOMVAR's set on a section-by-section (and global) basis are converted to v8 "variables" but the upgrade is not populating them even though the variable appears in the properties tab

You probably know what I'm going to say here - please report this via email to v8beta@actinic.co.uk.

.. and more .... my modified Act_NavigationItem.html has been replaced with the default

And again - please report via email.

The workflow does seem a little difficult at the moment .. but this may be due to thinking like v7 to be fair ..... need to spend more time with the design side of v8 to get things working more efficiently ... need a v7/v8 switch on my head to operate the two

Check out the beta testing guide for a guide to help you contextualise all the new stuff.

[jont]

@import URL .... already there on that one Lennie reported the actinic.css availability issue was already being looked at in-house

I have sent Toby the ACD for the CUSTOMVAR propagation

[cdicken]

Also if you make a change in the original design it says that the design is already registred and the box is greyed out. The user guide doe not cover this very well at all.

You don't need to re-register a design. Just make the change in DW and the change will automatically appear in Actinic. The link is permenant and dynamically updates.

The problem comes later when you wan to pass a design from Actinic to DW, there does not seem to be a way of doing it.

Hmm - you're right here - there's no easy way to do this. If you started your design in DW, you are sorted as you can just go into DW to make the changes and Actinic will automatically be updated.

You can go to 'Actinic | Import A Page Design From Actinic' to import an overall page layout from Actinic into a new blank page design, but it never really looks that good as it cannot find the Actinic stylesheet. I think we have some work to do in this area.

[RuralWeb]

Hmm - you're right here - there's no easy way to do this. If you started your design in DW, you are sorted as you can just go into DW to make the changes and Actinic will automatically be updated.

I assume that you can not now easily take a clean theme export to DW change the design and put it back.

[NormanRouxel]

I heard my name mentioned regarding Multi-Other-Info prompts.

As this is a really complex patch I decided to have a go and see how it would need rewritten for V8. The things I noticed were:-

1) The Design / Text / Phase -1, ID 2161 Other Info Prompt while still there doesn't do anything regarding the Product Pages (however it seems to be used within the Perl)! The other info code is now directly in the product template. Locating that and replacing it with my own code wasn't too hard. Indeed it's more flexible as I now have direct access to each variable rather than what the Design / Text way would have produced.

2) The Other Info prompt now seems to be generated with all non alphanumerics escaped (via & # 123 ; type tags). My code expected them as plain text. A bit of JavaScript patching to unescape the ones I use ({}.:|) and that was fixed.

3) The Perl scripts are pretty similar to V7 so my patches went in with no change.

Result: About 4 hours tinkering and I was able to use this patch with V8.

Documenting it in such a way that someone could install it into their design may be somewhat trickier.

[jont]

Result: About 4 hours tinkering and I was able to use this patch with V8.

A moment of sanity amid the panic ... well done Norman