Brain Fade

[odmedod]

I am on day 3 of the evaluation and suffering from extreme brain fade.

The plan is to add an online store to an existing website which is currently on my local drive. The pages of this site are surrounded by a box made up of a block of nine (3x3) table cells containing background images. The centre cell of this block has a white background and all the content appears in this cell.

Naturally I would like to use the same scheme as a template for the online store, inserting the content at the appropriate point: everything above that point in the HTML being a header, everything below that point being a footer. I can see no reason for that not to work.

Because the online store is being constructed in the Site1 directory, separate from the main site, this would appear to require a duplicate set of furniture - a main logo, images for the surrounding box - to be placed in subdirectories of the Site1 directory. This is no great hardship but it seems to be necessary because when the store is uploaded it is going to build its own directory on the server, and until it does that, the browser won't know where to find the images.

Or am I missing something? I must confess that I am struggling with the various instructions but this is because my first language is English.

al

[jont]

Hi Al,

welcome to Actinic. It depends on how you are going to handle the pages on the website as to where you store the images. I previously had a seperate directory for all the Actinic stuff and the other pages in another directory which were uploaded seperate. This soon became a nightmare and I simply moved all my web stuff into the Site 1 directory.

You are best keeping common images (logo's, backgrounds, nav buttons etc) in the root Site 1 directory so Actinic can preview them properly. Product images can be kept in subdirectories of the Site 1 (eg Images, Images2 etc) - so long as they are under the Site 1 directory you can specify them in the product tabs and then Actinic will lump them all together into the "actalog" directory on the server.

[pinbrook]

have you downloaded the advanced user guide and the developers guide from the actinic site.

the site design hinges around act_primary

[odmedod]

...I previously had a seperate directory for all the Actinic stuff and the other pages in another directory which were uploaded seperate. This soon became a nightmare and I simply moved all my web stuff into the Site 1 directory.

It might depend on what you mean by 'simply'. What if the rest of the site is fifty times as big as the existing contents of Site 1? Not tried it yet, but that sounds like a nightmare in its own right.

You are best keeping common images (logo's, backgrounds, nav buttons etc) in the root Site 1 directory so Actinic can preview them properly. Product images can be kept in subdirectories of the Site 1 (eg Images, Images2 etc) - so long as they are under the Site 1 directory you can specify them in the product tabs and then Actinic will lump them all together into the "actalog" directory on the server.

But if I do try to keep my logos and furniture out of the Site 1 root, so as to avoid unnecessary clutter, there will be an issue with displaying these items but only in preview; it will be OK when it is uploaded to the server?

al

[odmedod]

have you downloaded the advanced user guide and the developers guide from the actinic site.

Got the advanced user guide but couldn't see a developers guide on the downloads page. I assume the User Guides (Getting Started... and Designing with... are the same as those provided in the original program download?

...the site design hinges around act_primary

Ah. I see.

I think the problem is that the documentation has been written by someone who is far too familiar with what he or she is talking about.

Should I edit act_primary.html and save the heavily edited version? Will all the pages in the store then automatically conform to the new look?

Could I make a new directory called Site 2 and build everything in there?

al

[jont]

But if I do try to keep my logos and furniture out of the Site 1 root, so as to avoid unnecessary clutter, there will be an issue with displaying these items but only in preview; it will be OK when it is uploaded to the server?al

Product images kept in seperate sub folders in Site 1 will display in preview and uploaded. You only get issues with previewing images that are referenced from the templates - so if you drop a header into the Act_Primary template you are best keeping in the Site 1 directory.

Keep you main logos in Site 1 and all your product images in sub directories to save the clutter. This will also avoid the "error" message when creating a snapshot - Actinic does not like items referenced outside the Site 1 folder

If your existing site is very large I would recommend making the move gradually as I did - get the Actinic part up and running first and then try integrating as much as possible and use Actinic wherever possible.

I now use Actinic to handle around 90 per-cent of my sites and use DreamWeaver to handle custom pages (index etc). Whilst having everything in the Site 1 folder does get cluttered (keep product images in sub folders) it does ease the pain of having duplicate files in different locations amd makes alterations to designs etc much easier - I guess it depends on how much of your site will be e-commerce and how much is standard HTML or PHP etc.