Displaying sections and sub-sections horizontally.

[Cazzypoo]

I'm a designer using Actinic to build a store for a client. I haven't got much experience of using the software and I'm having trouble with the layout of the catalogue section links. I want the top level sections to display horizontally, one after the other. I realise this is easy enough to do by hand coding the links to the sections into the page. However, I also want the sub-sections to appear horizontally in table row beneath that of the top sections so whenever the user chooses a section the sub section links appear in a bar beneath that when the section page loads. I can find no way of doing this at the moment as so far I'm not sure whether it's possible to hand-code links into the individual pages other than the primary templates. Is there a way of doing this? Any advice would be appreciated!

[NormanRouxel]

Unless the site is small and the number of pages is fixed it's probably a good idea to try to avoid hand-coding.

However, if you have to, there's nothing to stop you using a different Primary Template (based on a common one) for every Page on your site. You can do this by selecting a Section and looking in Layout / Overall Layout, where you can either choose Use Parent or select any other Primary Template, including home-made ones.

As to your actual requirements it's a bit hard to tell from your description what you're trying to achieve. If you're able to post an image of a snippet of your Actinic section structure and the corresponding visual layout you'd like to generate that would help a lot.

Finally, Actinic can be asked to generate various JavaScript structures deescribing the entire section tree (or subsets of it). These can be used to automatically generate all sorts of alternative section navigation lists, but require reasonable JavaScript skills.

[Cazzypoo]

The site is pretty compact and the number of static pages is fixed - the only things that may vary over time are the number of products but these will be restricted to the sections and sub-sections which are already in place. There are only two levels of section the top section and their sub sections. I can hand-code javascript to a pretty good level but didn't realise that actinic would allow you to do this. Also how do I save my layouts as templates? Do I just rename them Act_Primary2.html and so on? The structure is something like this:

Top section
Sub section
Sub section
Sub section
Top section
Sub section
Sub section
Sub section

etc - obviously there will be products within the subsections.

It's difficult to reproduce the layout graphically but it'll be a bit like this:

TopSection1 : TopSection2 : TopSection3 : TopSection4: TopSection5
SubSection(1) : SubSection(1) : SubSection (1)

The numbers in brackets referring to the top section i.e. if they chose top section 2 it would change to

TopSection1 : TopSection2 : TopSection3 : TopSection4: TopSection5
SubSection(2) : SubSection(2) : SubSection (2)

Not sure if this makes sense.....

[NormanRouxel]

Do I just rename them Act_Primary2.html

Yes that's it. Also you can add entries (via Notepad) to PrimaryTemplates.ini to make selecting your alternatives easier (the layout will be obvious if you look in there).

Re the section layout. Actinic shows all the sub-sections of the section you're in. It doesn't quite do what you want.

You want to show all top-level sections all the time (with presumably the current one highlighted) and below that the range of sub-sections of the parent (again with presumably the current one highlighted).

This may well be easiest done with hand-coded templates for each of your top-level sections (all showing the same list but with the appropriate section highlighted).

When one of these top-level pages is selected Actinic will automatically generate the sub-section list for it. You can amend Act_SectionLine.html to fit into these into your row across layout. You'll also have to make the appropriate changes in Design / Options / Sections to set the number across you want.