Shop by Brand and links

[Stereo Steve]

Hello all,

New to Actinic and just got v7. I have the site up and it's functional with a couple products (for testing). You'll forgive me if I don't put the URL up but I don't want too many people poking around it before launch.

Anyway. Got all the store sections, payment, shipping etc sorted. I have gone for the 'Smart' layout which gives me 2 boxes. One on the left below the store sections box and one on the right below the cart box. I've wracked my brains trying to work out about customvars etc but am struggling.

What I want to do is have the left box called 'Shop by Brand' which I have managed. Now what I want is links in it which display items in that brand. So, I may have Panasonic, Sony, Hitachi links. Then, when somebody clicks them they get all products of those brands.

On the right I want to have links to custom pages such as an About Us page, a shipping page, terms, links, support etc.

Sorry if I'm being dim and I have searched the board and looked through all the manuals but I can't get my head around it. Would anyone be kind enough to give me at least some hints as to how to go about this?

By the way, the brands given are not what I am selling, just examples.

Thanks in advance.

[I-CC]

Assuming you have Business or above, because Catalog does not include search on CUSTOMVARs...

Create a new custom property called "brand"

Within each product assign the property to the product and enter the brand value, i.e. panasonic in your example... ensuring that use as customvar is enabled and search is enabled...

Then, within View | Search Settings, ensure that search on custom properties is enabled and you will be able to play with that element...

Then (as do not know you paths or anything like that) - create html links in your panel like the following (change to your cgi-bin and script id )...

<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/ss000001.pl?RANDOM=NETQUOTEVAR%3ARANDOM&PAGE=SEARCH&SS=&TB=A&PR=-1&S_brand1_0=Panasonic&GB=A&SX=0&ACTION=Search">Panasonic</a>

Something like that anyway...

For your menu items on the right, use html links if they will never change or use a text file in the site1 folder and reference it as a customvar or netquotevar include...

You might want to look through the Advanced User Guide for lots of tweaks and tricks available from the Actinic website download pages..

[Stereo Steve]

Thanks very much. I'll play with that tomorrow. Further searching this board has got me as far as putting a txt file with the html for the box in SITE1 and then using that for LEFTBARTEXT but I have been using the URL's of search results as link. So, if you click 'Shop by Brand/Panasonic for example you will got to the page that you get if you type Panasonic in the search box. Seems to work when you add extra products but I guess this is not a perfect solution and not very elegant. I'll try what you suggest instead now that I have at least got the HTML to work.

[Stereo Steve]

Nearly there!

This solution works up to a point but the search page tells me I should enter some search text. I have created the CUSTOMVAR 'Brand' and in the product given the value 'panasonic' and made it searchable.

I have gone to View/Search and in Searchable properties I have entered the CUSTOMVAR 'Brand' although I have not checked 'is Opt'. Is this what you were referring to or do I need to check the properties box under the 'results' tab?

Then I entered the HTML. Now I'm getting better at HTML but I'm a newbie learning fast so I'm a little unsure what it all means. I have edited up to

<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/ss000001.pl?

to my own cgi bin and domain.

The next bit

RANDOM=NETQUOTEVAR%3ARANDOM&PAGE=SEARCH&SS=&TB=A&PR=-1&S_brand1_0=Panasonic&GB=A&SX=0&ACTION=Search">Panasonic</a>


All I have done is altered 'panasonic' to the actual brand I want. Do I need to alter anything else in this string as it kind of looks like Latvian to me!

Thanks in advance.

[TraceyG]

Hi Steve,

I've just tried Techno-web's solution and it works fine for me.

This solution works up to a point but the search page tells me I should enter some search text

Do you mean you are getting an error message saying that you need to enter some text or is it just displaying the search input box? If the latter then this is because it is just taking you to the search results page where a customer can search on something else if they don't get the results they were looking for.

All I have done is altered 'panasonic' to the actual brand I want. Do I need to alter anything else in this string as it kind of looks like Latvian to me!

That's right but note that it appears twice in the code so change it in both places.

[Stereo Steve]

Thanks all. Scratched my head for hours and then realised I had called the CUSTOMVAR 'Brand' and was searching by 'brand'. Changed the CUSTOMVAR to lower case and all is well. Thanks so much for your help.

[Stereo Steve]

Oh, by the way, on the security side. I assume it's OK for my cgi bin and stuff to be displayed in the address bar at the top?

[wjcampbe]

I assume it's OK for my cgi bin and stuff to be displayed in the address bar at the top?

It is not a problem. The permissions you have set on the cgi-bin folder stop anyone writing to the folder, and they have to be able to read and execute the files for your site to work. (Don't panic and change the first permission to stop writing - that is the Actinic application )

[Stereo Steve]

Thanks Bill.