Introduction
First off, the techniques presented here were not worked out by me. I merely stood on the 'shoulders of giants', followed the trail of clues about the forum and tried to put them in a more palatable form for those who just 'want the answer'. The two key sources of information were the posts of leehack and the excellent block tutorials of gabrielcrowe
Disclaimer
I can't guarantee this will work on your site - it works on the one I have built it on, I've not tried to replicate it on another site yet. Make sure you perform a full site snapshot of your existing site before attempting this. Then, if the God's decide to piss on your fire, you can always roll back.
Example of the technique
Here is the site I have built it on: www.buyit247.com
Background of the example
It was built using Actinic Business 8.5. Executive was the base CSS theme I started with. I then changed the standard actinic.css and implemented the changes directly in the design tab.
The problem
A standard Actinic store has products listed under various sections. In many of the standard designs there is a sidebar that includes links to all the various sections of your store, called a Top Level Section List. However, you may not want all your sections listed in one big chunk. In the example above, I wanted some sections under a 'Products' header, some under 'PC Health Centre' etc. With the standard Actinic sidebar, you can't do this. This short guide/tutorial hopefully allows you to do that...
The solution
First of all you need to create a new 'variable' that you can use to differentiate one product section from another. That way, once each section is identified in some way, we can tell Actinic to place some in one section, and some others elsewhere. Here goes...
1. In Actinic, choose Design > Library and then in the resultant window, click the 'Variables' tab.
2. Scroll down to 'Section' and click the '+' sign next to it to expand. Now right-click on the Section header and choose 'New Variable' from the menu.
3. Now, define the new variable as shown below
This means that for each section you can now number it 1, 2, 3, 4 etc. So back to the example. I wanted all my 'Product' sections in one group so I set the variable to '1' for those sections. For the next section, I set all the relevant sections to '2' and so on throughout the store. Here is an illustration of where you change that variable for each list - it's at the very bottom of the 'General' tab for each section:
4. So, at the bottom, enter the correct 'list number' for each section in your store you want appearing in one of the lists.
Now it's time to actually display the differing lists. This caused some major messing about but the method that worked for me is this...
5. Switch to 'Design' tab, and select your sidebar area. Click in the current sidebar area and in the code area, switch to 'advanced view' (In the 'layout code' window it is the top left green button). Now highlight all the text, delete it and paste the following...
This chunk of code, if the Gods are smiling on you, will display the list of your sections you specified with a '1' in step 4. If you want to change the name of the header, simply alter the text 'Product Section 1' in the code above to whatever you want it to read.
NOTE: Styling of these lists, and their headers, is handled by the Actinic CSS stylesheet. If you don't know anything of CSS, best get on Google and read up, but suffice to say - when you understand CSS you can alter the way the lists appear (font size, bullet points, background etc) by choosing 'Actinic Stylesheet' from the drop down in the Design tab (illustrated below) and amending it accordingly.
The list code is then replicated at each point in your site you want another 'Top Level Section List' to appear and the list is limited to which sections it displays based upon the list number variable. So to show the product sections you labelled '2' in your store, insert the following chunk of code:
That's it. Just insert the code, using the relevant variable name (list number) where you want that section of the Top Level Section List to appear about your site.
Final Note:
After inserting the lumps of code into the sidebar, it is sometimes necessary to exit Actinic and go back in before it displays correctly. I don't know why, all I can tell you is that it worked for me.
First off, the techniques presented here were not worked out by me. I merely stood on the 'shoulders of giants', followed the trail of clues about the forum and tried to put them in a more palatable form for those who just 'want the answer'. The two key sources of information were the posts of leehack and the excellent block tutorials of gabrielcrowe
Disclaimer
I can't guarantee this will work on your site - it works on the one I have built it on, I've not tried to replicate it on another site yet. Make sure you perform a full site snapshot of your existing site before attempting this. Then, if the God's decide to piss on your fire, you can always roll back.
Example of the technique
Here is the site I have built it on: www.buyit247.com
Background of the example
It was built using Actinic Business 8.5. Executive was the base CSS theme I started with. I then changed the standard actinic.css and implemented the changes directly in the design tab.
The problem
A standard Actinic store has products listed under various sections. In many of the standard designs there is a sidebar that includes links to all the various sections of your store, called a Top Level Section List. However, you may not want all your sections listed in one big chunk. In the example above, I wanted some sections under a 'Products' header, some under 'PC Health Centre' etc. With the standard Actinic sidebar, you can't do this. This short guide/tutorial hopefully allows you to do that...
The solution
First of all you need to create a new 'variable' that you can use to differentiate one product section from another. That way, once each section is identified in some way, we can tell Actinic to place some in one section, and some others elsewhere. Here goes...
1. In Actinic, choose Design > Library and then in the resultant window, click the 'Variables' tab.
2. Scroll down to 'Section' and click the '+' sign next to it to expand. Now right-click on the Section header and choose 'New Variable' from the menu.
3. Now, define the new variable as shown below
This means that for each section you can now number it 1, 2, 3, 4 etc. So back to the example. I wanted all my 'Product' sections in one group so I set the variable to '1' for those sections. For the next section, I set all the relevant sections to '2' and so on throughout the store. Here is an illustration of where you change that variable for each list - it's at the very bottom of the 'General' tab for each section:
4. So, at the bottom, enter the correct 'list number' for each section in your store you want appearing in one of the lists.
Now it's time to actually display the differing lists. This caused some major messing about but the method that worked for me is this...
5. Switch to 'Design' tab, and select your sidebar area. Click in the current sidebar area and in the code area, switch to 'advanced view' (In the 'layout code' window it is the top left green button). Now highlight all the text, delete it and paste the following...
Code:
<p class="text_heading_left_column">Products Section 1</p> <ul> <actinic:block type="EntireSectionList"> <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22List%20Number%22%20%2f%3e%20%3d%3d%201" > <li><a href="<actinic:variable name="SectionPageName"/>"><actinic:variable name='SectionName'/></a> </actinic:block> </actinic:block></ul>
NOTE: Styling of these lists, and their headers, is handled by the Actinic CSS stylesheet. If you don't know anything of CSS, best get on Google and read up, but suffice to say - when you understand CSS you can alter the way the lists appear (font size, bullet points, background etc) by choosing 'Actinic Stylesheet' from the drop down in the Design tab (illustrated below) and amending it accordingly.
The list code is then replicated at each point in your site you want another 'Top Level Section List' to appear and the list is limited to which sections it displays based upon the list number variable. So to show the product sections you labelled '2' in your store, insert the following chunk of code:
Code:
<p class="text_heading_left_column">Section 2</p> <ul> <actinic:block type="EntireSectionList"> <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22List%20Number%22%20%2f%3e%20%3d%3d%202" > <li><a href="<actinic:variable name="SectionPageName"/>"><actinic:variable name='SectionName'/></a> </actinic:block> </actinic:block></ul>
Final Note:
After inserting the lumps of code into the sidebar, it is sometimes necessary to exit Actinic and go back in before it displays correctly. I don't know why, all I can tell you is that it worked for me.
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