V7 patch wishlist

[cdicken]

I'd have thought ACTINIC would have thought a bit more about releasing V7 with some new templates though isntead of the old stuff.

We need to keep all the old themes in there so people can upgrade to v7 smoothly - although I would like to see the back of most of them (especially all the ones in the the 'non-CSS' folder).

[garyhay]

Gary Hay used to have an off the shelf theme site but I can't find it ATM. It was really nice. I think that he prices started at £40 (that is less than one set of racing bouncers on your site Mark!)- but I think that they were worth a lot more than that.

This site is Actinic Themes which I did start developing but I felt that the Themes needed a bit more work on them. I developed this when V5 was released.

Problems that need to be overcome are:
[list=1][*]Changes to scripts in patches meant that custom buttons in the checkout disappeared[*]Using the Actinic Colour chooser never worked as all the graphics needed to be 8 bit gifs.[*]When using Developer if I needed to upgrade one Theme then they all got upgraded even if I never wanted them to.[/list=1]

My main gripe about building Themes as Actinic requires is the use of 8 bit gifs. This stops you being able to use photographs in the design as these cannot be run through the CBN maker.

If I decide to restart this project then the themes would not be downloadable. I would build configuration screens letting user choose the placement of parts of the page.i.e. Where they want navigation, how deep this navigation goes, a choice of product and section templates. I would then build the requested Theme and send a link to the customer when ready

Another thing that you could do would be to provide custom product layouts etc, so you are selling just a single template that could fit into other themes etc. That would widen the market a lot - you'd have to do a lot of colours though to try and get them to match.

Jan did you read my mind Dont really need to worry about colours provided you use CSS and make graphics 8 bit gifs.

[yvonne]

keep the clean layouts, keep the business css, ditch the rest

This I agree with wholeheartedly! I built the HVH store based on business css and have been tweaking it ever since. Totally overhauled it this year. I do the store home manually outside Actinic so I have more control, cleaned the templates from excess code, stole the script code from generated pages to be able to have buy buttons on the spin-off "details" pages, ditched the nav system, put the search box on every page, figured out a way to have popup product links without script tweaking, put links to cart and checkout top on every page etc. Still running v5 but am seriously contemplating upgrading to v7 as soon as the worst bugs have been dealt with -by somebody else! Wanna see it? Just click the link below.

yvonne
http://hiddenvalleyhibiscus.com/acatalog