How do I...

[eighteentee]

...I have an ExternalDesign setup and registered in Actinic without any problem. I now wish to have a home page that is similar but not the same as ExternalDesign and I just want to use that for one page only.

I tried changing the Layout to 'new', giving a new name and using ExternalDesign as the basis. This didn't work as I expected - any changes I made in the code to my 'new' design were simply replicated to my ExternalDesign thus rendering is useless.

This is probably a really easy one but it's got me fairly scratching my head...

[leehack]

Duplicate the external design, make your changes to that duplicate and then apply that duplicate design to just the page in question on the layout tab of that page.

PS - Use useful names for your threads, people searching at a later date might just find it then.

[eighteentee]

How do you mean 'duplicate'? Do you mean re-register the altered design to Actinic (from Dreamweaver) with a different name?

ps. sorry about the thread title

[leehack]

How do you mean 'duplicate'?

Copy it, so you have 2 layouts, the standard one and one for the special occasion.

[eighteentee]

OK, I tried that initially - whenever I made a change to my 'single use layout' somehow it made a change to the 'ExternalDesign' layout suggesting the two are linked somehow...

[leehack]

I've never had that happen, I can copy any layout in the design library and it works independently of the original. Perhaps you are experiencing a bug. Another alternative is to register a 2nd external design using DW, register it for brochure pages only, then go back into actinic, select the old one back for brochure pages and change the one special page to use the new design (eg externaldesign & externaldesign1).

I can change any page in my actinic to use any overall layout I want without a problem though, so not sure what is happening for you. It can definitely be done because actinic themes use 2 different templates for brochure and section pages.

[eighteentee]

Right. Just been to the library window, made a copy of ExternalDesign and called it HomePageOnly. I made the changes to HomePageOnly in code view and pressed 'apply'. As soon as I press Apply I can see that my preview window containing a layout based on ExternalDesign changes to what I have just done to HomePageOnly. How does that work?

[Duncan Rounding]

I've seen some wierdo's like this before as well and so I generally stick to one external design wherever possible and use blockifs to change the design based on either PageTitle or PageType. It can be difficult to follow sometimes but it saves the 'wierd happenings' and also means I ony have one design to manage.

[eighteentee]

I like facing things like this right on deadline (!)

[leehack]

It sounds to me that when you copy your external design, it also copies the links to your external html file. Therefore to counter this, you have 2 choices:

1. Copy an external layout of actinic's, doesn't matter which one, name it as you wish and then copy paste the contents of your external layout into it. Don't use the actinic copy facility (that's probably retaining the external link), just use copy-paste on the contents.

2. Register a 2nd external design, so you have 2 external html files

I always aim for one master template too, it has to be something incredibly different to warrant a 2nd template, but it can happen at times. What needs to be different, must it be a 2nd one? That usually just causes double maintenance instead of a few nifty blockifs doing the same thing.

[eighteentee]

Thanks fellas much appreciated. Going to give it a blast now...