Quick Tip: Including Recent Wordpress Posts in Miva Merchant
June 30, 2008 by Susan Petracco · Leave a Comment
The great thing about having a blog for your business is that it gives customers and search engines new content to view. It can increase sales by convincing customers of your product's benefits, or teaching them how to use it, or giving them ideas for incorporating the product into the lives.
But it's essential to integrate the weblog with your storefront. If customers can't go back-and-forth between your store and your weblog, the impact of your blog is going to be less than optimal. If you are using Miva Merchant 5 and Wordpress, however, one of the simplest ways to integrate the two is to include recent blog posts right on your homepage.
To start out, you need a template that can display a very simple HTML page - one that, in this example, is no more than the title of each post, linked to the full post itself. This can be done by modifying the index.php file within your Wordpress template (located in wp-content/themes/your-theme-name). Just add this code at the top of your index.php file:
The rest of your original index.php should follow this code. Then at the very bottom, close your "if" statement like this:
At this point, you should be able to see your recent posts by going to the following URL. Be sure to replace "domain.com" with your website domain name, and replace "weblog" with the correct directory for your Wordpress installation:
At this point, you're ready to begin working in Miva Merchant. You'll need Emporium Plus's Toolkit module installed. Then, inside Miva Merchant, go to Pages and edit your Storefront (SFNT) page or your Storefront Welcome Message (under Messages). Add the following code (again, replacing the appropriate parts of the URL as specific to your site):
This will print out the list of recent posts from your weblog right on your Miva Merchant storefront.
Quick Tip: Setting a Fallback Image
June 11, 2008 by Susan Petracco · 2 Comments
Nothing looks less professional than an ecommerce site full of broken images! However, if you're running a site with a lot of products, it's bound to happen every now and then. Here's how to stop it from happening.
Most ecommerce sites use images to provide a visual representation of their product line. Product images are usually set in one of two ways - either specified in a database field provided by the shopping cart package, or specified in a template by using a file naming convention (for example, /images/PRODUCTCODE.jpg where PRODUCTCODE is replaced with the actual code for each product). Either is a convenient way for specifying product images. However, because the HTML code produced is always dependent on the existance of an image on the filesystem. there is a possibility that your site will display the dreaded "red X" or broken image icons - or in some browsers, such as Firefox, the image's alternate text.
Although it's always best to have images for every single product, it's also a good practice to configure fallback images. These are images that display whenever the specified image in the HTML output cannot be found on the server. We do this by using mod_rewrite rules in our .htaccess file.
A .htaccess file (note the dot in the front) is a method offered by Apache for setting up configuration parameters for the web site. We start by adding the following line to enable mod_rewrite if it does not already exist:
The next set of code looks for any requested files that do not exist, and if the URL has the extension .jpg and resides in the images directory, it is replaced with the image "comingsoon.jpg" located in the images directory. The browser still sees the URL specified in the HTML, but the server delivers the comingsoon.jpg image instead:
Of course, make sure you actually have an image named "comingsoon.jpg" in your /images/ directory!
This method will deliver a fallback image, one that might say "Photo Coming Soon", in place of any missing images. No more broken image links.
If your site uses multiple-sized images, such as thumbnails and full-sized images, you can have multiple copies of this code in your .htaccess file, with the appropriate changes to manipulate files in different directories or with different naming structures. Below is an example from one of our clients, whose site displays 4 sizes of images, with each size residing in a different directory:
