Mac / PC comatibility

[00lewis]

Hi there,

I am currently considering Actinic to develop a shopping cart based site.
But before purchacing i would like to know more about how to change the templates/ appearance of the site. I mainly work on Mac's and am awear that actinic is a PC based piece of software. However not knowing how to use dreamweaver to change the templates is a worry. will i be able to do this part on the Mac, i dont really want to buy another dreamweaver software licence for the pc, can anyone help clear this matter for me?

Also can anyone roughly explaine how changing the look of a site is done?
Is it a case of crreating a css page in dreaweaver and then simply (hmmm) editing the php code?

kindest regards

[wjcampbe]

You do not have to use dreamweaver at all.

It is a nice to have if you cannot imagine what html will look like on the published page, or if you cannot understand the template relationships in Actinic, but certainly not essential.

Without dreamweaver, you can make changes in the Actinic HTML templates with notepad or any other text editor (not word - and not old versions of frontpage or any other programme which adds its own extra text into the file) and then preview the results either within Actinic or in your desktop browser.

That said, Norman is (I believe) a MAC user and may pop in here with some good news for you.

[NormanRouxel]

I only use my iMac for testing generated sites; not for development, so I can't help on that one.

However, as Bill says, if you understand basic HTML you should be able to edit the Templates by hand.

There's a bit of a learning curve regarding the Actinic way of generating pages (Primary --> ProductBody --> Product --> Product Image, templates etc), but there's plenty of help available on the Forums.

[jont]

Is it a case of crreating a css page in dreaweaver and then simply (hmmm) editing the php code?

More or less yes!

The solution is to a apply one of the clean themes and then start transfering your own design into the Actinic templates. As Norman points out there are a myriad of templates and nested templates and some tags generated from inside of Atinic itself.

It is a steep learning curve to start with. Check out the Advanced User and Design Guides in PDF from the main Actinic site and don't forget the ever present "help" button inside Actinic which can save a lot of uneccessary trips to the forum as a last resort.

[NormanRouxel]

And there's no PHP programming needed. Actinic uses its Templates to generate static HTML pages that it uploads to the server.

It can also real-time preview most of these pages on the back-office system so design tweaks can be eyeballed instantly.