Newbie Advice

[trevorjdaniel]

Hi,

I have had Actinic V7 for a few days now. So I am a newbie to this product.

Can any of you experts lend me an ear for 5 minutes to give me some advice?

I have got this far...

My Site is installed and working.
I have successfully added a number of demo products and relevant sections.

I now want to be able to customise it so it will look like my companies website. In fact, I want to go a little farther than that. I want to us a http module to embed the actinic shop inside my site. Almost like frames, bit not quite.

So, to do this, I have a few design questions about controlling the look and feel.

firstly,

I would like to remove the following elements completely.

The logo area.
The top menu where is says "Site Map", "Contact Us" etc.
The "Login" Button from the left handside.

These features already exist in my site. For example, I already have a contact us and terms and conditions and login system.

Can anyone shed some light if this can be done?

I am aware of the template system but am i going to be trying to remove bits that "cannot" be removed/hidden?

Thanks in advance

trev

[jont]

Hi Trevor,

it is worth downloading the advanced Design Guide from the main Actinic website as this has some good tips and advice.

There are many templates you can alter and each do different things - there are several which are the main ones to customise.

Act_Primary : this is the main "background" over which all the rest is overlaid. It is here you can remove the logo header etc and this creates the overall theme of the site.

Act_ProductLine : this is the main product layout for the images, prices, product refs and description etc. As this is embedded into the Act_Primary by Actinic the template will view funny - simply add the <table> and </table> tags into the page to temporarily view the table and cells- - make sure you delete the <table> tags before saving.

To create a Act_Primary to resemble your existing site it is best to apply a basic clean layout theme to the site and then chop the resulting Act_Primary.html page. You will see all the Actinic codes that are required - these can be positioned on your new template accordingly - some of the NETQUOTEVARS are optional and can be deleted - such as the footer guide which adds navigation etc - try <!-- the NVQ's out and seeing what happens in the preview pane in Actinic and you will soon get to know which do which.

[trevorjdaniel]

Thanks

Thanks for the information. Much Needed.

Anyway, for any other newbs out there I thought I would keep you up to date with my "idiots guide to actinic".

So far, the first 300 pages are dedicated to getting a reliable host with good support. Something I paid for dearly and have lost 2 days to.

Next, stumbled accross the Dreamweaver extension, and i mean stumbled, and as im a user, installed it. With a bit of jiggery pokery, it has turned out very userful. Although, at this very moment, i cannot find how to customise the shopping cart the way I have done the other pages.

Dooo take a look at this extension, although ive only used if for about 30 mins, i can see it's going to help.

Next, a thanks to the Actinic Support chaps, namely Kiran & James. Although I am still currently running an evaluation version, the support has been outstanding. A credit to the company. Something that will carry great weight when It comes to a purchase & reselling.

Anway, good luck to anyone new out there.

And also anyone who is trying, like me, to "shoe-horn" actinic into a Content Management System. Namely DotNetNuke.

TTFN

Trev