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**anne_marie** · 25-Nov-2009, 02:50 PM

nobody?
Oh well thanks anyway

**TraceyHand** · 25-Nov-2009, 03:04 PM

expecting a response in half a day is unreasonable, especially when it's a design query and you're expecting people with 'hard earned' design experience to offer their help.
It's not a simple, 2 line answer or someone would have given it to you already.
Unfortunately, for this kind of help you're going to need to wait until someone has time to explain fully and in layman's terms (not meaning to call you a layman but in terms suitable for someone who hasn't been able to work it out themselves)

**anne_marie** · 25-Nov-2009, 06:25 PM

Hi

No, I wasn't expecting an 'immediate answer' from anyone! Just i've spent a lot of money on Actinic and expected a bit more in the documentation etc to help me out. As the documentation is pretty basic, including the advanced guide, i'm getting really frustrated at doing what would be a simple thing in an open source solution such as /, and obviously my next port of call would be the help and advice forums for the product. I asked a question a week ago, which was never answered, and the last two questions i've asked for help with have been rebutted

Just i'm on a bit of a deadline, and i'm wasting my time going round in circles trying to figure out how to do something which should be relatively straightforward

Once, I have the time to master Actinic fully, i'm hoping that I will be able to contribute to resolving any similar problems myself in the future...

**leehack** · 25-Nov-2009, 07:09 PM

It's a recurring theme Anne Marie, you need help and you need it quick, but you are not prepared to put in a few minutes more effort into giving us the whole picture, so we struggle to help and have to guess or leave you alone. I read your post some hours ago and thought, well she listened well to the last comments, no doubt she will struggle for help yet again. I knew that would happen hours ago.

Don't fight the system, roll with it, you have to help us to help you. The more effort you put in, the more you will get in return. Remember, we are all volunteers giving up our own valuable time to help people, many of us are just simple actinic users like yourself, we just know a bit more than you at this stage - that is all.

URLs and screenshots are absolute musts for the level of help you require, if you can't do that, then you'll probably need to pay and get professional help instead.

**guccij** · 25-Nov-2009, 07:09 PM

When I first started with Actinic, I used the free 30 day trial to learn the absolute basics, try out different things and make mistakes.

Since you appear only to have started using Actinic a couple of weeks ago, it's still very early days. If someone's set you a tight deadline, they need to think again because I'm still learning (and making mistakes

) two years on.

There are Actinic courses which you could book yourself onto if you really want to hit the ground running.

**anne_marie** · 25-Nov-2009, 07:23 PM

Hi again folks

Thanks for the replies - they are very appreciated

I'm sorry if I came across as being a bit demanding or if I am moaning too much! I will try to post screenshots next time.
The sad thing is that I have found using Actinic to be a joy to use in setting up the majority of the store, especially for all the back-end shenanigans, and the part I thought would be easiest has set me back all day

I may just import the parts that I need to fix into Dreamweaver and see if I can fix it that way

**TraceyHand** · 25-Nov-2009, 07:38 PM

Originally posted by anne_marie View Post

The sad thing is that I have found using Actinic to be a joy

ahhhh...I remember those days

<disclaimer>quote may have been seriously editted! (and I may be lying

)</disclaimer>

**Rich Brady** · 25-Nov-2009, 07:47 PM

Anne-Marie,

Many of us have been in the same situation as yourself and I'm sure there will be many more in the future.

I do, however, think that anyone forcing a deadline on someone who is learning to use a new piece of software is a little rough.

You need to put the "ShoppingCartSummary" beneath your "QuickSearchBar" variable, providing that they're the standard layouts that are being used.

By Clicking on the search bar in the design layout you will see the code used. Click on the white "up" arrow with the yellow snail shell (bottom left hand corner) and you should see the "QuickSearchBar" text in pink. That's the layout, start typing "ShoppingCartSummary" and you will be able to insert that layout along side the search bar.

You will then be in the position to use your html skills to format how those elemnets are positioned.

I did see this post earlier, but simply didn't have the time to repsond then. "Bumping" the thread is a good way to provoke a reaction from users, but usually not the reaction you hoped for

**anne_marie** · 25-Nov-2009, 07:59 PM

Lol! Thanks for the advice

I am going to give that a go, after I have my tea for tonight - i'm sick of looking at the actinic interface, so need a little break for an hour

**anne_marie** · 25-Nov-2009, 09:28 PM

TY Web! It worked

I know it's a bit rough being expected to learn the software as i'm going along, but I have only been in the job for two weeks and my boss expects me to have picked it up as I go along

However, in these days a fulltime job is rare, esp where I live, so i'm going to spend a cpl more hours tonight playing about with it. He expects it al to be done by Friday, and as I say, i've nailed all of the catalog, business settings, back-end stuff, but the design aspects(which i'm usually good at)

are really confusing my tired brain!

**Rich Brady** · 25-Nov-2009, 09:36 PM

Your welcome.

Keep plodding on and you'll pick it up I promise.

**Darren B** · 26-Nov-2009, 08:39 AM

Ok im no designer or html guru but people need to stop looking at actinic as a different beast to any other html page you might design.

html
tables
css
are all the same in actinic as any other website using these, whats the main difference.

In laymans terms actinic does alot of the repeat work for you by the use of various layouts. Instead of having alot of coding to display your shopping backet actinic wraps this up for you so when you look at the page in the design window you have those lovely pink one line layouts - so if the look of this is fine but the postion is wrong then all you need to do is move it or reposition it with the appropriate css. If the look is wrong then you need to edit the variable to make it look right. When you upload actinic decodes these variables into standard html (well apart from some odd quirky things but we wont mention those)

I think people look to deep into actinic when infact it is actually simple to use, you just need to get you head around what your looking at.

The most important thing - LEARN html, css and tables your be 80% of the way there

**pinbrook** · 26-Nov-2009, 09:53 AM

I'm currently one week into learning a CMS and its painful, just the same as actinic is for the initial learning curve.

The documentation is just as lacking - well its not lacking it just doesnt tell me how to customise the way i want to - just the same as actinic.

However what it does say is have 2 copies, one where you experiment and one which is live - thus you can test stuff out in a test environment and then apply clean code to live environment.

Much the same applies to actinic - this is where the snapshot comes into play - take a snapshot, try stuff out, reimport saved snapshot etc etc

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