Monday Questions

[wduk]

Hello everybody, hope you had a nice week end.

Ok here are my monday questions ...

Q1: The site I am currently designing has some products that are the same except for the colour. Depending on the colour they have a different reference number. I wanted to only show one and tell the customer to choose from one of the available colours(from the drop down or radio buttons) and have the correct reference passed to the order form.

1. Is it possible?
2. How do I do it? I know that I can create 'invisible' products on the site but how do I link them to the colour chosen for the visible one.
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Q2: I am using developer to design the site, but my customer will be using Catalog to maintain it, therfore no customer account information available. At the top of my product pages (based on the clean layout 12 theme) I seem to get a lot of space that I think was saved to display customer information.

1. Am I right, about the customer account not available in Catalog?
2. Am I right, was that to display customer info?
3. Will it be used on a site managed by Catalog?
4. Can I delete it so that my products are closer to the top of the page, or is there another way?
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Q2-a: As I said my customer has Catalog to manage the site. How can I make sure that the site won't try to create customers account related button or other things (display the login and logout buttons etc...)

Do I only need to untick the 'Allow orders from customers account' in VIEW | BUSINESS SETTINGS | ORDERING or is there other things that I should be aware of?
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Q3: I noticed a 'remember me' box on the checkout.

1. Is this used in Catalog?
2. Does this use a Cookie?
3. How / Where do I set its duration and expiatation?
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Thanks for your help

Leo

[NormanRouxel]

Re Q1:

If you're not using Stock Control then you could simply but the reference number as part of the choice text.

E.g. Product reference XYZ

Red (XYZ01)
Green (XYZ02)
etc.

If you want to use stock control the you need to use hidden products, 1 for each colour. Create these products first. Now create the Buyable product and give it a Component say "Type". Create an Attribute Colour for that component and give it Choices for each colour. Now open the component and select Premutations, do Fill List and you can now associate a hidden product with each colourway using the Product entry in the table.

Norman

[wduk]

Thank you NormanRouxel,

I am not using stock control but I think I will use the second solution anyway because the product are

Product blue (abc)
Product red (def)
Product yellow (ghi)

They don't follow a defined pattern.

Thanks for the help again.

Leo

[cdicken]

Q2: I am using developer to design the site, but my customer will be using Catalog to maintain it, therfore no customer account information available. At the top of my product pages (based on the clean layout 12 theme) I seem to get a lot of space that I think was saved to display customer information.

1. Am I right, about the customer account not available in Catalog?

Yes.

2. Am I right, was that to display customer info?

Yes - the <Actinic:NOWSERVING/>, <Actinic:CURRACCOUNT/> and <Actinic:LOGOUT_SIMPLE/> tags are used to include the customer account info, but the biggest gap comes from the two <br>s after NETQUOTEVAR:HEADERTEXT.

3. Will it be used on a site managed by Catalog?

No.

4. Can I delete it so that my products are closer to the top of the page, or is there another way?

I would comment them out with <!-- and --> tags rather than deleting them, just in case your customer upgrades to Business further down the line.

Actinic will definitely not try and generate login etc. buttons. As soon as you import a Developer snapshot into Catalog, all the fields that reference customer accoutns etc. disappear and all the features disappear from the online store.

I noticed a 'remember me' box on the checkout.

This is available in Catalog and creates a cookie on the customer's PC that stores their non-critical information. This cookie is never removed, and there are no controls within the application for setting the duration of this.

[wduk]

Thanks a lot for this input.

Leo