Editing Templates

[dovroc]

Hi,

I have just been given the task of updating our company website We want to restructure many areas and give it a new look as well. My experience in web design has mainly been with dreamweaver, so I have lots to learn with regards to editing the website templates.

I understood from the actinic advance guide that all html files stored in the C:\Program Files\Actinic v7\Sites1 folder, can be edited in a program like notepad then saved, and expect to see the changes in the page preview.

As an experiment I made small changes to the code for a particular template, and the chages can be seen if I look at the template in a seperate browser. However, when I update the website the changes dont show on the actinic page preview or online.



Any ideas?

Dovroc

[Duncan Rounding]

You have to make changes to the templates not the actual created html files. So you would probably need to edit (depending on he customisation) Act_primary and Act_BrochurePrimary templates.

Backup first!

[dovroc]

Does that mean that any changes made to the HTML files will have no effect on the site?

[Duncan Rounding]

Yes.
Actinic uses the templates to create the web pages that it loads to the server.

[dovroc]

ok I see, but if you look at the gif I attached, how come then that the file names in the content tree are xxx.html? To edit these particular files would I also need to find the templates?

[leehack]

They are named after the section name or page name, can you not see the similarity in the names of the pages? They all use the site template to get their design but are named differently so they can be treated as separate pages online. If you change the template they use, then each page will reflect the change you have made, if you do not see that you have not done it correctly. Have a read up on the template system actinic uses and how it works, it's a very simple but powerful resource allowing global changes to a site very quickly.

If you have to go through the learning curve of actinic, i would get your company to buy v8 and learn that instead. V7 is very old and will become unsupported soon. It is also more difficult to grasp IMO.

[Duncan Rounding]

...If you have to go through the learning curve of actinic, i would get your company to buy v8 and learn that instead...

I couldn't agree more, v7 can be very difficult in that there are so many interwoven templates. v8 on the other hand, although still using the same principle, allows you to easily find and edit layout changes.