DoublePlus » miva merchant

10 Beautiful Examples of Miva Merchant Sites

Susan Petracco — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:46:44 +0000

If you've read this blog for awhile, ever talked to me, know what I do for a living, or have anything else to do with me in any other way, you probably know that I eat, sleep, and breathe e-commerce...and that my usual platform of choice is Miva Merchant. I've used other systems on occasion, for fun and for work, to various degrees, but Miva is where I started and where I spend most of my time.

No MMUI Please!

Miva Merchant ships with a default look-and-feel called MMUI - the Miva Merchant User Interface. It's there because it HAS to have SOMETHING, right? But it was never meant for public consumption...the developers always assumed people would replace it with an actual design. But many retailers didn't replace it - either they didn't have the skills, they were cheap, they were lazy, they didn't know better, or whatever - but lots of stores used it. And have been since year 19-whatever. Miva Merchant has since released a built-in CSS skin that is better, but still very basic, and yet this MMUI (see image, right, under the big red X) is still around on the web. You've probably seen it and groaned.

So I wanted to take this chance and showcase a bit of what CAN be done with Miva Merchant. Although I'd been planning this for a couple of weeks, in a timely coincidence, Chuck over at Merchant Tutorials posted about common Miva Merchant myths and the very first one is that the cart is limited in it's look and feel. Let's debunk that right now.

1. Green Tree Coffee & Tea

Green Tree Coffee & Tea

2. smallfri.com Birth Announcements

smallfri.com Birth Announcements

3. DJ Shadow

DJ Shadow

4. California Caviar

California Caviar

5. Mad Cat Toys

Mad Cat Toys

6. Bee Global

Bee Global Candle Studio

7. Mezzetta

Mezzetta Mediterranean Food

8. Rusty's Off-Road Products

Rusty's Off Road Products

9. Arcadia Publishing

Arcadia Publishing

10. Michael's Finer Meats and Seafoods

Michael's Finer Meats and Seafoods

One small caveat just for the sake of transparency: Mad Cat Toys is out of our clients at NetBlazon. But the design is completely the work of the owner, Dale Carlson of Propaganza...we just did the backend programming. So I'm not sneaking in a self-backpat or anything. Also, thanks to Scott from Sebenza for pointing us in the direction of Michael's Meats, a site I hadn't seen before.

Got any other examples of truly beautifully-designed Miva Merchant websites? Post them in the comments below!

10 Questions with Chuck Lasker of MerchantTutorials.com

Susan Petracco — Mon, 18 May 2009 16:58:47 +0000

Many Miva Merchant users are familiar with Chuck Lasker and the various ways he's been involved in the Miva community over the past several years. We caught up with him at the 2009 Miva Merchant conference to ask him ten questions about his new endeavor, MerchantTutorials.com. Find out how he got started with Miva Merchant, what MerchantTutorials.com is all about, and how you can subscribe to the service to learn how to do more things with your online store.

Quick Tip: Easy Domain Switching for Miva Merchant Stores

Susan Petracco — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:02:26 +0000

Because we do a lot of redesigns and offline development, our customers usually have at least two stores operational at one time - the live store and a development platform. Sometimes that makes it hard to test, though, if links from the development site link back to the live site half of the time. You don't always notice when you navigate away from the development site. The sessionurl and secure_sessionurl variables in Miva Merchant will automatically pick up the right domain. But any hardcoded URLs, if they are using absolute paths (and in most cases, they should) will not be as easy to manage. And if you use shortened SEO-friendly urls, you may have even more widespread URLs to manage. Here's an easy tip for Miva Merchant users who have more than one environment: set a variable in your store that references your domain name, and then build your URLs around that. This is easy if you use the Toolkit module from Emporium Plus. Go into Miva Merchant, click the name of your store within the left frame, and then on the right side, click HTML Profile. The great thing about this field is that it's usually the first field referenced by the store's page templates. (If your site doesn't use the HTML profile, or if you are running Miva Merchant 5.0 instead of 5.5, use the head tag insert field.) At the bottom of this box, enter the following code:

Then to change the variables for a particular environment, you just have two variables to change. Still too much work? You can use the toolkit to extract the url from your domain settlings instead:

After that, you can build your URLs using this "basedomain" global variable, and when you copy code from one site to the other, the links should still work. Here's an example link to the shopping cart page:

Quick Tip: Including Recent WordPress Posts in Miva Merchant

Susan Petracco — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:44:57 +0000

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:

http://www.domain.com/weblog/?pull=1

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):

&mvt:global:weblog;

This will print out the list of recent posts from your weblog right on your Miva Merchant storefront.

Building a Miva Merchant 4 Website with XHTML and CSS

Susan Petracco — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 20:29:00 +0000

For web development purists, the holy grail of coding an ecommerce site using an off-the-shelf package is the ability to write a fully standards-compliant site. The upcoming Miva Merchant 5.5 release brings this desire into full reality for Miva Merchant developers. Version 5.5 offers a completely-open page templating system, where all aspects of the site are fully customizable at the HTML and CSS code level. Historically it was much more difficult to code a Miva Merchant site with XHTML and CSS. We pioneered the effort, using a variety of add-on modules such as OpenUI and OpenUI Supermod templates to provide access to the code around the page elements. But the method also involved a couple of hacks of the core Miva Merchant files, to add a doctype declaration and to change the tags from upper-case to lower-case. OpenUI Supermod templates were slow, so we often added Merchant Optimizer to speed up the site. It worked well, but building a site in this manner was akin to applying band-aid upon band-aid to force a system, never intended to allow standards-compliant code, to produce the desired effect. The release of Miva Merchant 5.0 provided a huge step forward. With the addition of pages that can be templatized nearly from start to finish using Miva Merchant's Store Morph Technology, developers now had the ability to code almost the entire site according to modern standards for markup and layout. A few third-party modules were still needed, to gain access to "black box" code areas such as the category tree. But Miva Merchant 5.0 was already much faster, thanks to the ability to run the shopping cart on a MySQL database (instead of the older DBF files). And with native templating support, which renders quickly due to its compiled nature, several layers of complexity (and those "band-aids") were removed. Miva Merchant 5.5 brings this all into fruition, as developers can now access all of the code that builds the site. To get started, the first thing to do is to make sure every page in the site conforms to the proper doctype. I prefer XHTML 1.0 Strict, though we've sometimes used Transitional for various reasons. A doctype paves the way for CSS positioning by bringing Internet Explorer out of quirks mode, allowing the site to look very similar in all modern browsers, when designed properly. Next, all the tables should be removed from the pages, except when used to display actual tabular data. XHTML and CSS websites rely on CSS positioning to define their layouts, instead of putting images and content within the cells of HTML tables. Typically the only table we use on a CSS-based Miva Merchant site is the layout of the basket contents, since that is tabular data by nature. Instead of using tables, content is placed within other elements according to the nature of the content -

tags for block-level elements; tags for inline content,

tags for paragraphs, etc. Elements can be assigned a class or an id so that they can be styled via the CSS stylesheet. Larger Miva Merchant sites often need to consider the fact that the site may also include other packages or custom-coded sections that reside outside of the Miva Merchant framework. To reduce the load on the filesystem and to keep the assets organized - as well as to make it easy to switch between one client and another - we try to standardize the location of the site's assets. For example, all site-wide graphic files are stored in a /images/ path, just off the document root, and not within the /mm5/ directory tree created by Miva Merchant. (This /images/ folder may be further subdivided into subfolders such as /images/buttons/ as needed.) JavaScript code is placed in external .js files located in a /js/ directory. And the stylesheet(s) are stored in /style/, with the main site stylesheet being named style.css. Additional CSS files may be added for popup windows, printing a page, or page-specific elements, but are almost always stored in the same directory. Once the CSS file has been created, it can be linked into Miva Merchant by adding a