Actinic Shopping Cart - Can I replace?

[WebGuyStu]

I have developed a website using Actinic, and due to numerous problems have decided to develop my own shopping cart front end and stock control system.

I would like to keep the existing sites "back-end" up and running (with HSBC secure e-payments), and link my bespoke solution into it. Is this possible?

I guess I can develop everything up to the checkout - I would just need to link it from here to Actinic / HSBC.

Does anyone know if this is possible?

Cheers

[NormanRouxel]

A potentially HUGE job, but not insurmountable. You can add products to the cart by directly calling the Actinic generated ca000001.pl script in your cgi-bin - you just need to figure out the form variables to pass. There's info on the Forums and Knowledge base regarding doing this.

Similarly, you check-out by calling os000001.pl.

Here's the main problem with using the Actinic Perl scripts with your own front-end:-

The scripts make use of datafiles on the server that are created by Actinic (the A000n.cat set of files). There's one of these for each Section (HTML page). You'd need these to be created to reflect the Actinic product tree and this can only be done via an Update or Refresh, so you'd still need all your products in Actinic to do this.


One half-way-house route might be to use the Hierarchical Import to load Actinic with your bespoke products, but with the Product Templates modified to comment out the NETQUOTEVAR:ADDTOCARTBUTTON and any other variables that you want to generate. You can then embed your own HTML in the import's product description to do your own cart calls.

This is the route I use for Norcat - a product that completely builds an Actinic site from the Fashion, Footwear and Sports industries Top to Toe EPOS system. Most products in such shops need a colour/ size matrix of buy buttons and an image per colourway and this is implemented by generating custom HTML that adds such features. See e.g. http://www.snowlines.co.uk/acatalog/...R-JACKETS.html and scroll down a bit and you'll see souch features in use.

Norcat wasn't a trivial exercise, however. There's more than 17,000 lines of Delphi there. Not all of these are needed to build the replacement HTML of course. It does a lot of other things as well.

[WebGuyStu]

Cheers for the heads up Norman

[BPJSURF]

Why go to such trouble ? I am curious as too the specific nature of the problem that has made you think replacing the Actinic front end is a good idea? If your having specific functionality or design problems with your project I would be very interested to hear what they are specifically. We have built a lot of sites and crossed some difficult tasks which we managed to conquer using the Actinic software and its possiable we may have encountered your problems. In which case we would share our expereince to save you from the un godly task your about to undertake.

Brian