Own html site with Actinic for cart

[MarkBrown]

I am about to develop a site which will contain a lot of written information about the product and company, spread over a number of pages.

I'm very experienced at writing HTML longhand, and would like to develop this site in the same way.

However I would also like to incorporate Actinic to handle the shopping cart side of things. There are only about 5 products, with a small number of variations, so they would all easily fit on one page.

Does anyone have experience of developing a site in this way, i.e. using Actinic only for the cart page, and developing the rest of the site independently of Actinic? If so, what are the pitfalls?

Look forward to any help.

Best regards

Mark Brown

[NormanRouxel]

Tricky but possible. There are postings in this Forum and the Knowledge Base regarding "Adding to Cart from outside Catalog" (or similar terms). Some searching will produce useful results.

Life is trickier if your products have many choices as the Form data that must be submitted is more complex.

One way to attempt to deal with this is to get a page working in Actinic, then copy / paste the HTML of that page (just the <form ...> .... </form> stuff that surrounds each product) into your own pages.

There may be other issues to ovecome (e.g. Actinic expects product pages to be within an acatalog directory on the server), but the source of these pages will help.

The other thing to consider is that it may be much easier to let Actinic do its stuff and change the Theme and design within Actinic's way of doing things to match the way you want the site to look.

[jont]

This is very possible - it is just the reverse of what alot of Actinic sites do it using Actinic for the majority and adding in the odd HTML page outside to do something specific... often the homepage.

As Norman suggests the way to go is to create the page in Actinic and then rebuild the theme to suit the rest of the site - this can be slow due to the multiple of nested templates but is quite achievable and you wold need to comment out the various Actinic navigation elements etc to retain the main navigation.

With the navigation disabled it would be just a case of Actinic uploading its few things tomake the page and cart work and everything else would sit under the external HTML

[MarkBrown]

Thanks, what I'm now thinking about doing is creating the bulk of the site in my own way, and have a link on that main site called "Shop" which links to the index.html of Actinic, then strip out from Actinic everything that i don't need - contact us, T&C etc as they will be in the main site that i produce long hand.

Only prob i anticipate with this is that there'll be two index files in the root directory - if push comes to shove i'd even be happy to host the shopping cart under a different domain name.

Any views on this?

Anyone know of a site where something similar has been done, i.e. the cart page in actinic, main site written with something else?

[wjcampbe]

Mark,

You can remove the Brochure parts from Actinic completely, and have only the shopping area (product information and cart) uploaded to the /acatalog/ folder.

Your own site, would sit in the root (with links to other folders as required) with a "Shop" or "Products" link through to the Actinic Content.