Customvars

[harlequin]

I would like to use customvars on a seperate non-catalog page but still have actinic replace the customvars for me when generating the site.

History:

for a 'review this product' script
( http://www.redeyefrog.co.uk/acatalog/Mini_Cooler.html )

sometimes use php or asp forms dependant on server etc... this is usually named something like productreview.php which is obviously our own page and nothing to do with actinic.

I would like however to pop some customvars in place of some code in productreview.php to save future editing and aid the creation of generic templates using only customvars as far as the end user sees.

Can I 'ADD' the productreview.php/asp to actinic in any way so it replaces the customvars as if it were a catalog page?

I am sure this would help with lots of other little template things we do and we would be very grateful.

Steve Quinn
Harlequin Domains
www.harlequindomains.com
0800 0832077
Specialist Hosting, Design and Marketing of Actinic Websites

[harlequin]

hi, not got time to explain how now, but have sorted this particular issue ourselves..

The solution i have is using php, I DID actually manage to get actinic pages to be .asp by going into actiniccatalog.mdb and changing the sPageNAme in sections table to be .asp
this seems to work fine, but the only trouble is when you go back into actinic and try to re-edit the details of that section page for whatever reason (changing description / images etc). If you leave the section alone, it seems to upload with .asp extension fine, and all actinic generated links point to /acatalog/yoursection.asp without trouble.

However if you do edit the section, Actinic then kicks in with a 'extension not valid' message when you try to ok your changes.

If there is a way of disabling this troublesome message then im sure it would work fine...or is there a good reason why asp extension isnt supported? (Maybe its another veiled hatred of everything Microsoft, joke!)

Anyway, .php is cross platform so for the product review script we are creating a nice generic template...by the way, all our harlequin clients get ANY templates we create for free.....dont all rush now...

;)

[cdicken]

Hi Steve

Just to let you know that *.asp will be added to to the list of accepted file extensions in a future maintenance release of Actinic. It won't be in the next one to come out, but it will be in the one after that.

[harlequin]

Steve

[harlequin]

:)

[cdicken]

Database editing is the only way to do it atm.

[NormanRouxel]

To make altering the database more easy why not change the extensions of the pages that need altering to something you never use (.vrml for example). Now you can use an access query to look for all names ending in .vrml and fix just them.

Alternatively (if you're feeling really brave and lucky) these lists of extensions seem to be hard coded into Actinic and could possibly be hex edited. They're a bit tricky to find as each character like in "vrml" above has a null between each letter e.g. 760072006D006C00. There's more than one place where this appears too so you might break things if you change the wrong one(s). Only attempt this on a spare system.

Norman

[harlequin]

i just spotted a chat between techno web and our client and he advised possibly changing them to .htm (or maybe vrml) and setting the server to parse them as .asp

Im gonna try this in the short term as requires no d.b. editing and opens up quite a few opportunities...

will let you know how we go...

thanks

[Nick]

Originally posted by harlequin
i just spotted a chat between techno web and our client and he advised possibly changing them to .htm (or maybe vrml) and setting the server to parse them as .asp

Im gonna try this in the short term as requires no d.b. editing and opens up quite a few opportunities...

will let you know how we go...

thanks

Hi Steve

Did this trick work for you? I'd like to do something similar but with PSP instead.

Cheers
Nick

[harlequin]

i tried it right away on the server but to be truthful i only gave it an hour....

hopefully my tech guy will sort this for me this weekend...will let you know if we find anything out...

steve

[harlequin]

hi nick, dont know if you have sorted out your issue from developers forum http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2130 but Actinic actually is fine with .php extension

if you look at your post in here you must have mistyped php as psp and i thought it was some sort of funky new page code developed by payment service providers :D

i am sure you know where to edit the page name for any page so just try saving with .php extension ....

Steve Quinn
Harlequin Domains
www.harlequindomains.com

[Nick]

Hi Steve

Yes, I did mean PHP - psp was a typo

Although I can change the page name for product pages to use a .PHP extension, the site's base page name has to have .htm or .html - Actinic won't let you specify anything else.

Anyway, it was a simple matter of configuring the server to parse .HTM file extensions as a PHP file and this worked fine.

However, the PHP include would not work in any of the cart and checkout pages (i.e. anything called by a perl script). So, alas, in the end we had to ditch the idea of using a PHP include and settle for hard-coding the menu into the relevant Actinic templates.

Thanks for your advise.

Regards

Nick