Where to start when designing for actinic?

[tjobbe]

I have the "Getting Started with designing" guide and I have done a *little* bit of research into this, but I really don't know where to start, how many sections I actually need to edit or anything?

I am fully proficient with xhtml, css, basic php and javascript, but looking at it from the outside makes me go cross-eyed.

I can design my own template which I will hopefully be incorporating into actinic, but no idea where to start.

Can someone please just exaplin to me how many file I need to edit, where they are and what the netquotevar actually means?

I'm sorry if im being thick, but the guide and a few other places I've looked have all confused the hell out of me, so I would love it if someone could tell me the basics in brief!

Thanks in advance,

[chris ashdown]

I would suggest you start by putting a site online either in test mode or for real

You will learn a lot of your questions just setting up the site as it goes

Once online and happy with the basics you can do with the controls available, then is the time to start playing with the templates atc

Check out the advanced manual on the actinic site

[acompton]

Reading through the guide in one go is a bit of a mind-overload experience. If you haven't tried anything yet, start by trying a few layout styles - just pick one and start playing.

There is a helpful tool in the software that shows you what template files correspond to which parts of the page. I can't remeber where it is in the menus, but I think Ctrl-L will launch it.

NETQUOTEVAR is Actinic's text-replacement macro system. Each NETQUOTEVAR corresponds to a setting in the software, or a value in your product or catalogue definitions. they are used in the templates and when you generate your website, they are replaced by the value taken from the Actinic database. They are all listed in the Advanced Guide - but there's a lot of them.

Alan Compton
www.greenknightgames.co.uk

[Mike Hughes]

A very quick overview of actinics templates system:

Actinic uses templates that allow you to decide the design/layout at different levels. the key ones are:

- The primary templates that define the overall layout for the page (headers, navigation, overall look and feel etc)
- The product templates that define how a product is layed out (where the image, description, price etc appear).

There are some others but once you get to grip with the two above then it should be straightforward to understand.

If you'd like to get a quick start on this then you could consider going to one of actinic's training days. See http://www.actinic.co.uk/training/index.htm

Mike