Product Section General Description

[omp199]

I'm using Actinic v7, and I can't for the life of me work out how to get the section description to appear on the section page. I can't see why it doesn't appear by default, as I can think of very few situations in which a user would not want the description of a section to appear on the page for that section.

The help page headed "Adding a New Product Section" has a table under the subheading "The 'General' Tab", which gives a description of the "Description" field. It says, "Select a description for the section. This will be used within the link into the section, but can also be used within the section page itself. See Overall Layout Templates for more details on this."

I followed the link to "Overall Layout Templates" for the "more details", but there were no details there about getting section descriptions to appear on section pages. The only line that looked relevant in that page was this one: "Individual sections – set in the 'Layout' tab of a section – see Changing the Appearance of Sections."

So I followed this second link, on to "Changing the Appearance of Sections". That told me that there were two aspects to changing the appearance: "Changing the layout of section links" and "Changing the layout of section pages". I'm interested in the latter. And yet the table under the subheading "Section Page Layout" only told me about changing the "Overall Layout", the "Location and Arrangement of Section List", and the "Shopping Mode". The second and third didn't look relevant, but the first only referred me back to the help page for "Overall Layout Templates", which is where I'd just come from! So that was no help at all.

I've spent ages trawling through the help files, and searching this forum and the Web, just to try and find out how to do something that seems so trivial - getting the section descriptions to appear on the section pages. But I've found nothing. So how do I do it?

[RuralWeb]

Looking at your site it has been customised so I suspect that the code that inserts the description has been removed. You will need to put it back

[omp199]

Thank you for the reply, RuralWeb. Do you happen to know where the code that inserts the description is supposed to go? And what code do I use to insert the description, once I've found the right place? I've spent a long time looking, but can't find anything. Hence the frustration...

[RuralWeb]

Do you happen to know where the code that inserts the description is supposed to go? And what code do I use to insert the description

I do but dont have the time to write it all down here - you will be best talking to the person who designed your site who will be able to do it in a few minutes.

[omp199]

Thank you for the further reply, RuralWeb. I think we may have misunderstood each other, as I wasn't asking a site-specific question. The Actinic help file itself says that the section description "can also be used within the section page itself. See Overall Layout Templates for more details on this." It just fails to give those "more details".

But never mind, I've found the details now. I went through the Advanced Users Guide, and found that the code that inserts the section description is "NETQUOTEVAR:SECTIONTEXT", and that this needs to be added to the file Act_Primary.html. It wasn't a matter of code being removed. As the Advanced Users Guide says, "This variable is not placed in the Act_Primary.html file by default, but is available to it."

If the help file had just said, "Insert the variable NETQUOTEVAR:SECTIONTEXT into the file Act_Primary.html," instead of, "See Overall Layout Templates for more details on this," I would have got there sooner...