Create product that doesn't appear on menus

[Alan Jones]

Hi

Sorry if this has been asked before, I couldn't find any relevant threads.

Is it possible to create a section or product that can be bought by people who come to that particular page through a link, but won't be seen by anyone else?

My thinking was that it would be a normal actinic page, but not appear on any of Actinic's menus.

I've tried to do this with hidden products and hidden sections, and it doesn't work as they don't appear when you visit the page.

Any help much appreciated.

[jont]

Hiding products removes them from the system - you need the products / section there but not show as part of the main navigation.

How you achieve this depends on your theme / navigation in place. With most of the themes the solution is to bury the products into a subsection section - use an invisible GIF as the section image and use no text for the section name. This will still be shown in the sitemap but will minimisethe number of users finding the page not via the direct link.

Customer accounts may also be used to hide items from no registered customers but this is not as seemless and requires pre-authorised accounts to be set up and may bnot be of use for a general advertising campaign / promotion

[NormanRouxel]

You could hide the product by using a customised Product Template that has everything commented out as below.

<!-- ProductLineInvisible HTML begin -->
<!-- Insert HTML for the top of the individual product -->
<!-- NETQUOTEVAR:INCLUDE Act_ProductSeparator.html -->
NETQUOTEVAR:ENDSEPARATOR

<!--
NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTFORMBEGIN
NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTIMAGE
NETQUOTEVAR:TEMPLATEBEGINXML
NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTANCHOR
NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTNAME
NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTREF
NETQUOTEVAR:PRICEEXPLANATION
NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTPRICE
NETQUOTEVAR:DISCOUNTINFO
NETQUOTEVAR:OTHERINFOPROMPT
NETQUOTEVAR:DATEPROMPT
NETQUOTEVAR:CARTERRORXML
NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTQUANTITY
NETQUOTEVAR:ADDTOCARTBUTTON
NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTDESCRIPTION
NETQUOTEVAR:EXTINFOLINK
NETQUOTEVAR:EXTINFOBUTTON
NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTBEGINLINK
NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTLINKTEXT
NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTENDLINK
NETQUOTEVAR:TEMPLATEENDXML
NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTFORMEND
-->

NETQUOTEVAR:NEXT
<!-- ProductLineInvisible HTML end -->

[jont]

Norman - I must be having a bad day - how would that template allow the item to be added to the cart or are you thinking about using the "add to cart from anywhere on the internet" technique?

[NormanRouxel]

Whoops. I didn't think that through. I thought the original poster wanted to do the "Add to Cart from Outside Actinic" bit. However you could still do this as follows.

Use a Section containing the Product using a normal template. Temporarily copy all other product to some other temp Section. You now have a page containing just the one product. Update the website. Now FTP to the server and rename that particular page to something new and unique.

Now copy back all the normal products to the Section, change the special product to use the invisible template and Update again.

You now have an isolated page that contains this product and a valid Section containing your usual product with the special one hidden.

[Alan Jones]

Thanks for the responses guys.

Before I try them, does anyone know if upgrading to Actinic Business (we're using Catalouge at the moment) would enable me to do this more easily?

[cdicken]

Not particularly - all the suggestions given are available in Actinic Catalog.