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ActiveDoc 1.0 Release

It's here! The tool for creating a printable brochure of your Actinic sections and products is now available for download at www.activestock.co.uk. For just £75, you can produce a professional marketing brochure based on a customisable Microsoft Word template. There's also a free trial version that allows you to try it out before buying (it's limited to 20 products). Some more details are available on the ActiveDoc help page.

As always, please get in touch if you have any questions or comments.

'Sort By' function for long section pages in Actinic - part 2

OK, so here goes on how to set up Actinic. First things first, create the dropdown list box at the top of your section list layout (e.g. 'Section page with section name at the top'). You might want to wrap the dropdown with a 'blockif' using a custom variable defined at section level, so you can choose for each section whether to sort or not. This example uses a variable called 'SortSection':

<actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22SortSection%22%20%2f%3e">
<div style="float:right; padding-top:15px;">
<select id="sortoption" onchange="sortProducts()">
<option value="Sort">Sort by:</option>
<option value="12">Price Low-High</option>
<option value="21">Price High-Low</option>
<option value="az">Name A-Z</option>
<option value="za">Name Z-A</option>
</select>
</div>     
</actinic:block>

If you've studied the javascript file in Part 1, you'll notice that the 'value' attribute for each tag above is used in an 'if' statement to determine how the sorting behaves. You could, of course, add more sorting options once you're comfortable with how it all works.

Next we need to identify the element of the section page that contains the product list. This may be a <div> element, if you're using a css layout, or in the case of Actinic's default 'Product List with Horizontal Dividers' it may be a table. Either way, you will find it in the Overall Design tab in the List Layout Settings. The first element in the 'Start of List:' box should be given id='Product Table'. This allows the javascript to assign it to a variable and manipulate it.

Now we need to let the javascript find all the products so at the top of the product layout, we add a new div and set id="sort" (remember to also add a closing <\div> tag at the bottom of the layout). After that, the main <div> element containing the product layout needs a special id to include the Product Reference and Product Name variables, separated by a "|".

<div id="sort">
<div class="product_list" id="<actinic:variable name="ProductReference" />|<Actinic:Variable Name="ProductName"/>">

The script now has the Product Name in a variable for sorting with. Next we need to dig a little deeper to expose the price. We do that by wrapping some elements around the price variable in your price layout (e.g. Standard Tax Inclusive Price) and setting their id. So, for example:

<div id="sort-<actinic:variable name="ProductReference" />">
<div id="<actinic:variable name="ProductReference" />|<actinic:variable name="TaxInclusivePrice" />">
<actinic:variable name="PreFormattedPrice" value="Product Price Including Tax" /></div>

The script looks for an element with id="sort-[ProductReference]" and then looks in the first child element and uses its id to determine the product price. Ordinarily, we could have done this in the previous step using the ProductPriceRaw variable, but unfortunately there is currently a bug in Actinic that means that when a product price is changed, the ProductPriceRaw variable for its duplicates is not adjusted accordingly, without using the 'Reset Duplicates' function.

Now, there is one further complication that we need to account for. Some products have their price defined by their components, for example in a dropdown list, and so no price element is displayed on the page for the script to use. To handle this, we set up a custom variable called "LowestOptionPrice" at product level and manually complete it for products where this is the case. (So a product with 2 options at £4.95 and £9.95 would have this variable set to 4.95).
We now need to use this variable in the id for an element in the attribute layout (e.g. Standard Drop Down Attribute):

<div id="Zsort-<actinic:variable name="ProductReference" />">
<span id="<actinic:variable name="ProductReference" />|£<actinic:variable name="LowestOptionPrice" />">
<actinic:variable name="AttributeDisplayLabel" />
</span>

Notice the inclusion of the currency symbol (£) before the custom variable, as this would be automatically included in the 'standard' products and is handled by the script.

Finally, make sure the product-sort.js file is stored in your 'Site1' folder and is included in the <head> part of your main layout.

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="product-sort.js"></script>

Use the preview in Actinic to check everything is working and that your preferred styling has been applied to any new elements. Upload when you're ready to go!

Disclaimer: this requires some reasonably advanced knowledge of how Actinic works and an appreciation of javascript will also help. I'm afraid I can't offer any support with this and if you choose to use it, it's at your own risk!

'Sort By' function for long section pages in Actinic - part 1

This is something I have just completed for MumStuff and it works a treat! There were lots of little quirks within Actinic that had to be overcome and I thought I'd share how I achieved it. I'm also making the javascript functions available for free, but I'm not offering any guarantees that they will work with your site, so be prepared to tinker if that's your thing!

So, to start with, you can download the javascript file here: download
This contains lots of comments that hopefully start to explain how it works. I'll post Part 2 soon with some more details as to how to set up Actinic.

ActiveDoc progress

ActiveDoc, the new tool for generating a printable brochure of your Actinic products, is currently under beta testing and will soon be ready to go. Like ActiveStock, it will be licensed on a one copy per website basis and pricing will be a once-only affordable payment.

A new feature that will be incorporated prior to release is an image checking service. This will read all the image filenames and paths from your Actinic database and check that these actually exist on your PC's file system. It will output the results into a text file for you to examine and take any actions, if necessary.

Actinic User Conference 14th October 2009 - review

Lots of interesting chatter on Actinic Community, blogs, Twitter, etc. about the conference on Wednesday.

It was a useful day and I'm sure every attendee came away with plenty to think about. I was a late call-up to the Customer Panel and was only too happy to talk about how we've used Actinic as MumStuff.co.uk has grown up (with my wife's permission, of course!!).

Most of the chat has centred around the new features list for V10. Obviously, the real time stock control is of interest to me as it performs essentially the same function as ActiveStock. However, I have yet to have it confirmed that the option to allocate stock to PSP-Pending orders or not has been included. This is something that ActiveStock customers requested early on in its development and something I put a lot of effort into solving.

The Feefo review partnership has also caused a lot of discussion. We implemented Soapbox reviews from Codepath last year and have been very happy with it - we're convinced customer reviews increase conversions and generally add to the look and feel of the site. Whether a truly independent 3rd party review database is what merchants really want, I'm not so sure - we'll have to wait and see.

For plug-in developers, I'm sure the announcement about the API was good to hear. But it's very early days and there's no real indication as to what format it will take - just an interface to the Access database or integration into the core Actinic user interface?

In the customer panel I was asked about E-mail newsletter software and recommended Tecmail from Teclan. Its integration with Actinic was the main reason we went with it on MumStuff and it works well - you can find it here: http://www.teclan.com/acatalog/E-Marketing.html

Finally, I had a number of interesting conversations (I guess that's the main point of these conferences!) and these certainly influenced where I might be focusing my attention next:

• ActiveDoc (the brochure creation tool) gained quite a bit of interest so I'll get that completed asap
• Using Excel for custom invoices - something we do at MumStuff but I hadn't yet considered it as an 'ActiveStock' product, but I will do now
• A few other ideas that I'll progress when I can

As always, please get in touch if you'd like to discuss any of my products, custom development or business services.

Actinic User Conference 14th Oct 2009

Looking forward to this as it will be a chance to put some faces to names. I've also been asked to sit on the Customer Panel (representing mumstuff.co.uk) to answer some questions about how Actinic has been put to good use on that site. If I don't get a chance to fully answer some questions, I'll post some info here after the event.

Creating a brochure of your Actinic products

Sorry the blog has been quiet recently, but everyone needs a holiday!

Development on the core ActiveStock program has taken a bit of a back seat as I've been working on a new product. "ActiveDoc" is a tool to create an MS Word-based printable catalogue of your Actinic products. It uses a Word 2007 template with a simple table layout and some styles, extracts the sections, products and options from your database and creates a new document for you. You are then free to add a front page, a table of contents and set up the various styles as you see fit. It will hopefully be ready for beta testing in a week or two.

If you want to know more, please get in touch.

New ActiveStock website

A brand new website dedicated to ActiveStock is now in the public domain! Find out about the products and the services that are now being offered here: www.activestock.co.uk

Version 1.2 now released!!

The long-awaiting version 1.2 has finally been completed! Here are the release notes:

Release Notes v1.2

Additions to previous release (v1.1) - 23rd July 2009

1. The PSP Pending order handling option is now managed via a tick box in the Settings tab of the application
2. ActiveStock now includes the option to trigger Actinic's order download function
3. A scheduled option has been added to run the process of order downloading and stock file uploading in the background
4. The Settings tab includes the option to manually set the path to the online store (acatalog) folder required by the ftp server to upload the stock file. This may be necessary when this setting is not available in Actinic's network settings or the website is hosted on a Windows server where a relative path may not work.
5. The testscipts.pl code has been modified to prevent errors when running on a Windows server where scripts are not necessarily run in the cgi-bin folder.