Behaviour of ss000001.pl

[cornishpirate]

I'm trying to keep a really clean screen and have noticed the following:

1 Going from html page to html page, such as info.html to search.html, the page does NOT noticeably clear. Great. More than great - Perfect.

2. Navigating between products and also between Home and Store Entrance, the screen blanks totally before being refreshed. This would appear to be because ss000001.pl is called.

Don't understand Perl (yet), but is it really essential for this routine to clear the screen?

Alan

[Mike Hughes]

You only need to use links that go via the perl scripts if you're using customer accounts. If you aren't using accounts then you can avoid it and that would get rid of your problem.

Mike

[cornishpirate]

In Business Settings/Ordering I have unchecked "Allow Orders from Customer Accounts".

Makes no difference - still executing Perl.

[pinbrook]

do you have catalog or business?

business will create left hand nav using scripts, catalog has some menu systems that will produce hard coded menus.

There will be more info somewhere in the forum about this, or its a case of swapping in and out the menu systems until you get one that is hard coded

or hard code it yourself.

but you may want to consider what is more important, a slight pause or having to maintain a hardcoded menu yourself

[cornishpirate]

Jo, using Trial Catalog. Just regenerated in Business. No difference.

Are you saying that using Javascript Left Hand Nav will always call the Perl routine?

Alan

[NormanRouxel]

The JavaScript navigation uses a file called Act_section_tree.js that contains the Perl links. Have a look at that file and you may deduce a way to strip out the page name and use these instead.

Alternatively, you could create your own direct navigation - See the Advanced Guide for "Advanced List Functionality".

[NormanRouxel]

Here's how to tame these JavaScript links.

// typical line from Act_section_tree.js
url = "http://www.mysite.com/cgi-bin/ss008005.pl?SECTIONID=Computers.html&NOLOGIN=1";
url = url.replace(/(.*)cgi-bin.*SECTIONID=(.*)&NOLOGIN=1/,'$1acatalog/$2');
// url now contains "http://www.mysite.com/acatalog/Computers.html"

[NormanRouxel]

And here's a replacement (untested) YahooSections routine that uses this

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
function fixurl(url){
  return url.replace(/(.*)cgi-bin.*SECTIONID=(.*)&amp;NOLOGIN=1/,'$1acatalog/$2');
}

function YahooSections(ar)
{
var strIDs = '';
for (var i=1;i<=ar.length;i++)
  {
  if (ar[i].sURL != null)
    {
    strIDs += '<a href="' + fixurl(ar[i].sURL) + '"><span class="actxxsmall"><b>' + ar[i].sName + '</b></span></a><br />';
      {
      if (ar[i].pChild)
        {
        for (var j=1;j<=ar[i].pChild.length;j++)
          {
          if (ar[i].pChild[j].sURL != null)
            {
            strIDs += '<a href="' + fixurl(ar[i].pChild[j].sURL) + '"><span class="actxxsmall">' + ar[i].pChild[j].sName + '</span></a><br />';
            }
          }
        }
      }
    strIDs += '<br />'
    }
  }
return strIDs
}
//-->
</script>

[cornishpirate]

Many thanks. It'll take this novice a while to play with this!

In the meantime, I had chosen a different layout for my test site (2 Header, 1 sidebar) which behaves much better.

But am I missing something here? Is there documentation anywhere stating not only what these layouts are in detail, but also what they do (ie use Perl to switch product pages) ???

[NormanRouxel]

How Actinic operates under the bonnet is of so little use to most users that you'll be unlikely to find much documentation.

You have the Library, the source of the generated pages and the commented source code of all the Perl scripts available. That's where I looked to give you the tweaked YahooSections.

Then there's the Knowledge Base and Advanced Guide as well.