First time user of this forum - help appreciated

[kristeenL27]

Can anyone help - I am using Actinic Catalog V6 for our travel and ticket agency site, and up to now have had to enter dates for each new month for each show/concert which takes hours.
What I would like to know is whether there is a facility, either on this version or on another version of Actinic which woiuld enable me to create drop down boxes for each show/concert with dates/months on, so that the customer can pick the day and month for each show, without me having to enter each show and then the subsequent dates on individually. If anyone can help it would be much appreciated. To see how the site works at present you can look on www.premier-ticket.com and perhaps give me some advice?
Thank you.
Kristeen

[jont]

Hi,

looking at the site you have each day as a unique product .. eg Lion King, 21st July in London ... 1 product ... Lion King 22nd July London... another seperate product.

This works very well IMHO for the site - especially if you are using stock monitoring to show ticket availability.

It could be streamlined by placing the sections (months) into say 2 columns rather than a long list to make it visible without scrolling.

You could create the products as per your thread by having the 1 product with an option for the day set as a drop down - however this would still mean adding the details (either to the drop down or a hidden product) and would not immediately show if the date is available.... availability of tickets is going to be a very important selling part of any booking site

You could possibly automate the procedure to make life easier for you but the way you are doing it with the 1 product per page / show is the best solution for your site

[kristeenL27]

First time user

Hi Jont,

Thank you very much for your help.

The only query I have is that you mention automating the process - how would this work, and what would I have to do?

Thanks

Kristeen

[jont]

Automation can be done in several ways:

If you have repetitive content (such as info on where to stay near a London venue) this can be added to the product template as a CUSTOMVAR ... a customisable variable ... you would specify which file to include against each product and the information is automatically added from a central HTML page. Updating the one HTML page (if say a phone number at the Hilton changed) would update all the associated locations on the website without having to go through each and changing manually.

If you are using a database or a spreadsheet at the moment for the back office side of things these too can be either attached to Actinic or the details imported over.

If you have not used CUSTOMVAR's before check the forum on how to set them up or in the Advanced Users Guide on the inline HELP inside of Actinic.