Precise positioning of images etc

[James Gladwin]

Am an Actinic Newbie, and going through learning curve after moving from another shopping cart. Am I right in thinking that I need Developer (I have Catalog) in order to position images,text etc in precise locations on a page, according to a design, via Dreamweaver? I don't seem able to find positions other than "centre" "right" on the templates...

Apologies if I've missed this on a previous thread...

[NormanRouxel]

You can a simple text editor like Notepad to edit the templates and achieve any look you desire. Most of them are quite short. You do, however, need to know a bit of HTML as you're looking at the raw code.

I've never used the DW integration so perhaps someone else can comment further.

Norman

[Martin Smith]

IMHO the Dreamweaver add-on is useful but no substitute for knowing HTML. Its strength is the ability to easily locale and load the template that governs any part of a page.

My advice re: the original question would be to hard code a margin on the image with css.

[harlequin]

hi there..a little bit of advice here is try this.

go to advanced>template manager>and click the editor button.
then navigate to your c:/prog files/macromedia/dreamweaver4/ and choose the dreamweaver.exe to be your editor.

click ok until you get back to template editor and go to the section tab.

then click product line button, and the product template opens in dreamweaver.

on the page that opens up, click, file>save as> and add qq to the start of the filename its saving, i.e. qqAct_ProductLine.html

this gives you an unused as yet file to play with....

one tip here is that because the <table> tags are held OUTSIDE of the product template in actinic, at the start of the product template add in this at the very top of the code.. <table> and this at the very end </table>

this has the effect of showing you your table layout for a product more easily.

from there you can see things like NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTIMAGE and generally you can move these about and position them as you wish.

the only time you will need to know about is that sometimes for example you may move NETQUOTEVAR:SIMPLESEARCH and try to align it left in your templates, whereas that NETQUOTEVAR calls another template ( Act_SimpleSearch ) which has the actual search aligned to the right...thereby sorta overriding your placement of the NETQUOTEVAR that called it.

when you are happy with the look of the template, dont forget to remove the extra <table> tags we put in above.

you can then either save the file with a meaningful name, i.e. i always save them like this

template_mytemplate.html so that i can locate my custom templates simply when looking for them.

you can then choose that template for any of your product layouts.

when you are happy with that, if you post back i will describe the simple method for making those templates available in actinic without having to browse for them all the time...

last think, i totally agree with the guys above and knowing html is far far better than using d/weaver, but i learnt my html from dreamweaver as you can watch the code as you build...so its a good midway...

steve quinn
harlequin domains
www.harlequindomains.com
0800 0832077

[harlequin]

http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2539

you might also like that post which describes how to use html in your product descriptions/titles and more..

in the example i only used text and tables, but you can see how easy it is to modify your requirements..

steve

[James Gladwin]

Thanks, everyone - very helpful. My coding has come via dreamwever and I found it hard to *get* that it can be done another way! I ws going to ask if anyone had examples of a page that had been done purely via Actinic that was more than a standard catalog page - so, thanks, Steve.

Best - James

[harlequin]

i did say i would tell you next stage.

ok this ones actually quite simple...

in your site1 folder, if you locate the .ini files or configuration files they are described..

for a product layout template open ProductTemplates.ini in notepad... look at the first few lines

Act_ProductLine.html=Actinic original product template.
Act_CenterProductLine.html=Vertically centered text.

and you will see the format is

htmlpagenameoftemplate=Description of template that is available in actinic

so you can add as many lines as you wish below these i.e.

jamestemplate.html=My Product Template

the only thing to be careful of is keep spaces out of your html page name use an underscore...

put the = sign directly after the html page name without a space

AFTER the = sign you can put any description you want....

for such a simple method, it makes all your custom templates available within actinic and saves you loads of time when editing the catalog...

let me know if this helps any..

ps, you can actually work out the actual preview of the template that is shown by the lines below these....or you can look now in the help files to see how to show a bitmap preview of your template in actinic..

steve

[James Gladwin]

Thanks - that's v-e-r-y helpful. Going to be an interesting weekend!

Best - James