Pagination of Products

[demalpas]

I hope and pray that I have missed something fundamental, but I can find no mention in Actinic Business V9 (including the Advanced Users' Guide) concerning pagination for the display of products. This leads to very, very long pages of results which to me seems ludicrous. How anyone with a few thousand products copes is beyond me. Surely pagination is fundamental to either the display of a search result or to just clicking on a product section or sub-section. Nobody wants to or should need to scroll a page of perhaps hundreds of products.

This is a problem that should, I believe, have been provided by Actinic. Pagination is a standard facility on other shopping cart software I have come across. Has anyone else found this deficiency in Actinic and provided a solution please?

Norman's solution seems to have disappeared from his website - but I stand corrected if it is still there and I missed it.

Mike de Malpas

[Duncan Rounding]

This may help - Advanced User Guide page 36: Splitting a Section into Multiple Pages: Creating Links to 'Previous' and 'Next' Sections

[leehack]

Nothing automatic in the software, but nothing to stop you creating your own page 1 of xx type sections and splitting your products into these. The search results do paginate and you set the amount of results per page in the search settings.

With actinic you create the pages on which people will land, so if pages are required, you need to create them. You can't really compare online and offline databases in this way, you are comparing chalk and cheese and what is one of actinic's strong points, presents this weak point or lacking feature you mention.

It is easy to overcome though and quick.

[Duncan Rounding]

Also see this KB article:
http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=44805.

[NormanRouxel]

I've not got a pagination solution but do have a live site sorting add-on that lets you display a list of products alphabetically or by price (reversed if required). It can also be tweaked to sort on a user defined variable. Live on www.snowlines.co.uk where it's also being used on the search results.

[fergusw]

Mike,
Are you looking for something like the pagination effect seen here?
It does not create separate HTML pages, as per Lee's suggestion (which could be better SEO wise) rather it creates a dynamic pagination effect using javascript.
The number of products in each page is user defined.

[demalpas]

Pagination of Products

Many thanks to all of you for your swift responses. I am disappointed to hear that Actinic, by the nature of its fundamental design cannot do pagination. Despite that fact that it uses stored HTML pages instead of having them dynamically produced by the Access database, using a better (proper!!) multi-user data base (e.g. MySQL) it could (I think) store a unique page key (embeded in each page) and then output the pages based on the key - or something like that.

However, as a half-way house, I think a combination of the defined number of products per section/sub-section as per http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=44805 with Norman's sorting solutions will do the trick for the time being - albeit it has limititations when you need to add/delete/hide products. I also liked the solution at http://www.teclan.net/demo1/acatalog/Books.html except that it used multiple products per page and I believe that is not such a good solution for search engine optimisation.

Thank you all for your help.

Mike de Malpas