Multiple column problem

[East2West]

Hi!

I'm only just starting to design my website using the trial CD.

It was looking quite smart, but the products and fragments were down in a central column with a lot of wasted space either side.

Today I used some code I found on these forums to split my products into 2 columns. There should have been plenty of room for them since there was so much wasted space on either side before, but instead the 2 columns have been squashed into the same width as the initial central column.

I hope someone out there knows what I mean and can offer a simple solution!

You can have a look at my site at http://trials.actinic.com/trials/trial18260/

Please help! Many thanks in advance!

[Kevin]

What's worse is they display in a single column in my browser - looks like client-side script is being relied upon to create the two-column layout. I'm new to v7 too, but this sort of rubbish certainly never happened in the earlier versions.

To answer your question: You can increase the width of the column containing the products by opening Act_ProductBody.html and editing this line smack in the middle of it:

<TABLE WIDTH="500" COLS="3" BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="5" CELLSPACING="0" ALIGN="CENTER">

Change the width to something greater than 500.

[pinbrook]

change the width to a percentage like 90% rather than a hard coded number. This will allow for fluidity on different screen resolutions.

[East2West]

Thank you for your messages.

However, the Table Width is already set at 100% and the ACTSWIDTH is also already 100%.

Could it be anything to do with the following line in the code:

var colwidth = Math.floor(100 / CUSTOMVAR:NUMCOLS)

I have tried changing the number 100 which does have some sort of effect on the columns, but I don't know enough about what I'm doing.

[Kevin]

No, that's not the problem, the problem is this line:

<table align="center" border="1" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" cols="3" width="500">

If that's not in your Act_ProductBody.html template then I don't know where it is.

[East2West]

I have the following line in my Act_ProductBody.html template:

<TABLE WIDTH="100%" COLS="3" BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="10" CELLSPACING="0" ALIGN="CENTER">

ACTSWIDTH is also already 100%.

And yet the columns are clearly not using 100% of the page width. Do you know what the problem could be?

Thanks for your help.

[wjcampbe]

Untick the Compact HTML/CGI box in Design | Options | Miscellaneous then preview the page in your browser. Click View | Source and the file will open in Notepad. Edit | Find type '500' in the search box (without the quotes). Then look above this for the first template name you come to. Edit that template to get rid of the fixed width.

Did you change the number of columns in the text you added to your templates or is this still set at 3?

Have you added the CUSTOMVAR to Design | Options | Site Defaults and assigned a default number of columns? Have you added the CUSTOMVAR to the pages where you are using it and defined an alternate number of columns?

More questions than answers - but hopefully this will get you looking in the right places.

[East2West]

Thank you.

I have done what you said. The fragment now goes along the whole width of the page but the two columns are still squashed together but on the left of the page now for some bizarre reason!

I tried to upload the site so that you could see the difference, but even that is not working at the moment! I just get a pop-up box with the message: 'The system cannot find the file specified! - Another problem!!

I don't think Actinic is designed for beginners!

[NormanRouxel]

Looking at http://trials.actinic.com/trials/tri..._Books_15.html I still see

<TABLE WIDTH="500" COLS="3" BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="10" CELLSPACING="0" ALIGN="CENTER">

and that's coming from Act_ProductBody.html.

It may be that's what you want as the two column layout seems to have gone.

PS the netquotevar is ACTSTDWIDTH and not as you've spelled it above.

[East2West]

Sorry. I had given up the 2 column thing (perhaps too soon) and had changed it back to a single column. So you probably looked at it after I had changed it back.

I have now changed it back again to 2 columns so that you can see the mess!!

Suggestions pleeeeeese!

[NormanRouxel]

Actinic doesn't support a multi-column layout so I wrote the code (or "rubbish" - as Kevin would have it) to allow it to do so for those who really need it.

This should lay out the products in evenly sized columns (and incidently fail-safe to displaying a valid single column layout on non-JavaScript browsers).

It's not doing as expected on your site so there may be a subtle problem that's preventing it from working properly.

Unfortunately I'm on holiday and won't be able to look at this for some time.

However

[wjcampbe]

To be fair Norman, Kevin's comment was that the results were rubbish - not your code.

I also suspect East2West may have used the version of the script that is in the advanced user guide and not your original code.

Enjoy your holiday - see you back here soon.

[Kevin]

I wrote the code (or "rubbish" - as Kevin would have it)

To be fair Norman, Kevin's comment was that the results were rubbish - not your code.

Perhaps I should make myself clear: My remark was that the practise of bodging something as straightforward as a multi-column layout using client-side scripting was rubbish.

I've recently been asked to make a number of changes to a v7 site to make it more search-engine friendly, and this site uses the same script we're discussing here (and also the YahooSections() function to generate its navigation, and Actinic's default scripted pop-up "More Info" links). By the time I posted in this thread I'd spent the whole day writing server-side scripts to parse .cat files and .js files and asking Apache to preprocess all html documents before serving, in order to replace all these browser-dependant scripts which were being relied upon to do important jobs.

I appreciate that your script is performing a non-critical task, and that it degrades gracefully in script-deficient UAs, so it's a good script. I was simply frustrated at the end of my first day with v7 that these kinds of scripts have to be written at all.

Apparently v8 will bring the template system bang up to date and shut me up for good, but as this was my first job with v7, and since I hadn't come here to complain since my first job with v6 (and my first job with v5 before that) I thought it was worth poking my nose in just to say I'm still watching

[East2West]

Does anyone know when version 8 will be released? Would I be better off waiting for that version?

[cdicken]

There's no release date for v8 yet.