Customise Catalog Templates

[olivercoquelin]

Is it possible to design your own catalog templates or can you only customise brochure templates?

[jont]

You can customise any of the templates in the site1 folder. The main catalog template is generally Act_Primary.html

[olivercoquelin]

Thanks Jont but it is the content of the top level shop page (Online Catalog in the Content Tree) that I need to edit rather than the usual surounding buttons etc.

The effect I am trying to achieve is one large image in the centre of the page with two section links, one on each side (a picture of a man on the left and a woman on the right). The sections under this will have their own layout.

Please could you tell me how I would go about this?

[jont]

Oh OK.

The "easiest" way to achieve that layout into the overal theme is to create a text only fragment and into the text area of the fragment place HTML code for a 3 column table ... your 2 people images in the outer columns and the larger image in the central table cell. You need to place any HTML code between !!< and >!! tags to tell Actinic it is HTML and not to display the code as raw text.

Depending on your HTML skills often best to create a dummy table in say DreamWeaver or FrontPage etc and simply copy and paste the generated <table> codes across into Actinic

[olivercoquelin]

Thanks again Jonty. That gets me close to what I need. I used the HTML in the fragment technique and also set the section links to have the the layout image only and then used no image in order to remove any additional info from the page. This is the result:

http://www.greeneyegear.com/acatalog/collection.html

Basically I need to remove the blank area and the seperator bar. Is this possible?

[jont]

The space above the image is being taken up with a <br> line break and also the links to the sections are still there - hovering in the area shows the links - to remove these altogether you can wrap these into a <div class="n"> and set the CSS to display:none to remove from the flow.

Caution that hiding elements (especially on a homepage) is disliked by serach engines as can be seen as spamming.

The seperator can be commented out in the fragment template - Actinic may throw a caution over this - or you can edit the Act_nSeperator.html template for the brochure seperators (can't remember the exact name from memory)

[jont]

You could try setting the section images to be displayed side by side to occupy less space

[olivercoquelin]

to remove these altogether you can wrap these into a <div class="n"> and set the CSS to display:none to remove from the flow.

Which template should I edit to do this? If it is Act_Primary then will all the sections beneath have their links removed also?

[jont]

You can use different Act_primary templates on different pages but thinking about it again the generating code is coming from the bulk area of the template

[olivercoquelin]

You could try setting the section images to be displayed side by side to occupy less space

How would I go about this option?

[jont]

Design | Option | Settings allows you to set the row counts for the sections

[olivercoquelin]

I have achieved a look close to what I need using the Row Counts function that you suggested:

http://www.greeneyegear.com/acatalog/collection.html

Two problems remain. As a get around solution I have created the central image as a fake button. Is it possible to remove the link from this or alternatively link it to the same page (collection.html)?

Secondly there are unwanted gaps above and below the images. This is caused by Actinic putting <BR> tags all over the place. This is a problem throughout the site. Is there a way of stopping it from doing this?

[jont]

Is it possible to remove the link from this

Have you tried modifying and creating a new the Act_SectionLine template with the link removed and specifying as a new Section Link Layout type against the sections "layout" tab?

caused by Actinic putting <BR> tags all over the place.

<br /> tags are the bane of v7. Try unticking the "compact html / cgi" option and view the source of a previewd page to see if the tags are coming from a specific template and/or check in the Design | Text and search for <br> and temporarily add in consequetive markers against each occurance eg <br 1> <br 2> and then preview to see where it is being generated from.

That should find them - if not it is possibly part of the program code