Different designs per section

[mnew]

I have a client who wants to offer 'shops' to various organisations. He wants each organisation to have their own products and also for the site to look like that organisation's web site.

Is there a way of doing this? I thought at first just a different design per section, but then the basket and checkout pages would not have the organisation design ( we might be able to live with this limitation )

Or perhaps an include file could be added based on the calling url so http://www.myshop.com/default.htm?shop=customer1 would use a different include fle and hence design to http://www.myshop.com/default.htm?shop=customer2

The other posibility is to run the Actinic shop within an iframe placed on the customers website. Has anyone done this? Are there any issues with using this method?

Sorry for the long question.

[jont]

iFrames are a bad idea even if you can get them to work. If it is one site then the order will come through to the same place but you could always make the cart plain vanilla.. but then the terms would all be different.

Others have done this but it is handled under an umbrella site and they act on a commission basis and pass the order on.

[leehack]

There are probably some ways of doing this through logins, but i expect that buying multisite and having a site for each client is probably the easiest method. Depends on how many you are talking about really i suppose, but even then, the more you do the easier it is to manage it with separate sites.

It will also depend on how different you want the designs to be, if it was a base color and a logo, it would be infinitely easier that a total change. If you are looking at full design, then separate sites IMO.

iFrames are not an option IMO.

[mnew]

Thanks for the quick replies.

There will be many 'sub sites' and from a point of managing the orders the client would prefer the whole system to handle all the sites.

The designs would be very different unfortunatly but I would think that we could 'get away' with a different page heading logo etc and different colours.

I found this in the Advaced guide, might this be away around using iframes?

"Running Actinic within a Custom Frame

If you are just browsing products, then Actinic will run with no problems within an existing custom frame.

However, you must ensure that the frame set file is on the SAME domain (web site) as the Actinic store. If you do not do this then Internet Explorer will stop your Actinic store from working because it will treat the Actinic shopping cart cookie as a 'third party cookie' and customers will not be able to add products to their shopping cart. The same will happen if you are accessing the store via a different URL than the one that is in your network settings.

Also, there are potential difficulties when you go get to the point of making payments in the checkout as no SSL padlock will appear within the browser if the secure pages are being viewed through a non-secure frame.

The best way to avoid this problem is to check where it says 'Remove Custom Frame in Checkout' in 'Design | Design Options'. This will mean that any frames will be removed at the start of the checkout phase.
In the 'URL for Completed and Aborted Checkout' field you can then put the URL for your frameset document. Therefore whenever anybody leaves the checkout for whatever reason, the frameset will be restored."

[leehack]

I don't think Actinic is the right product for this purpose, i think you need an online system that when logged into, serves up the sections/products plus the design elements.

[mnew]

you may well be right

[cdicken]

I don't know - I think it probably is possible.

You can have a different outer layout per section, and you can also have a different inner layout per section (what used to be known as a ProductBody template). So in each section you could have a different product list, with different product layouts in each section. You can set the inner layout to use on each section in the 'Main Product Area Layout' setting in the Layout tab of each section.

You would still have the issue though of the lack of branding on the checkout page - unless you went with the (shudder) frames option.

[leehack]

I agree with Chris that this could be done, I think it would be a 'nice to have done/achieved' project rather than a sensible/scalable one though. You'd simply have to have set sizes for items and style the easy way with colours and images. You could serve up dynamic CSS according to a log in.

[mnew]

The plan is not for users to log in but for each external web site to link to a particular section

[leehack]

Fell at the first hurdle then i expect as all sections will be accessible by everyone.

[mnew]

that is not a problem

[leehack]

So one big shop and when someone selects a particular section it gets served up to them in the design and colours of the company for whom that section was specifically built?

So section A needs to be for company A
Section B needs to be for company B
etc.

When company A select Section A, they get their own colours, when they select section B, they see company B colours?

If that's right, then you are far closer to a solution. If you can keep to a set size and basic layout, you can just change colours and graphics by having some inline css setting the styles and overriding the site master ones. This would even work on the checkout. If you wanted the ultimate solution, you'd actually do it all by body ID, in fact that is the way to go i expect. Style your containers according to the body tag ID and have the ID set to each company.

[mnew]

That is the idea, thanks.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'doing it in the bodyid' but I will investigate and try some tests.

can use use includes in actinic?

[leehack]

If each page has it's own body ID, then you can talk to the CSS containers via that Body ID in the normal CSS file, this gives you a quick and easy way to manage adding a new company as you follow a set format of defining say 5 or 6 items. Or you can do a blockif serving up inline CSS dependant on which section you are in. You could create a layout for this and include that layout, all you need to work on then is the layout in the design library. You would even be able to send a PDS to add new customers if you were to do the maintenance. Unless your client is clued up you would need to do all the adding of new customers i expect (at least on the styling side).

[mnew]

Thanks for that. The client is quite happy for us to do the design for each shop as it comes on line ( more money for us ! )

You have given me plenty to play with. I will now try to implement the first 'shop'

Thanks