This month at the Miva blog we discuss making your website design top-notch while also keeping it relevant to your industry and audience.

I first started working with Miva Merchant back in 2001 as a freelance developer. Back then, most people’s first exposure to Miva Merchant (originally Miva) was the result of it being offered as a free shopping cart add-on to their hosting plan. Since it was free software, many small businesses began using it without even really considering other choices. Over the years since then, many free open source shopping cart platforms have come and gone; and while many of those original Miva Merchant customers may have jumped ship along the way in pursuit of that mythical perfect free shopping cart, those who stuck with Miva have been the beneficiaries of a mature, solid, well-built platform that has made millionaires of many of those first small business owners.

Read our complete post at the Miva Merchant Blog.

This is especially important if you have employees making continuous updates to your website content. Most shopping cart platforms, including MIVA Merchant, have global headers and footers for content that is included on every page of the site, such as your site navigation links, footer information and promotional banners. This content is being delivered to the web browser when a visitor is on both non-secure pages as well as on secure pages, such as when in the checkout process. As the global areas of your site get updated with new content, you need to make sure the links to banners or security badges or any tracking codes are created correctly so that they are accessible on every page in the website and do not cause security alerts or broken images.

Of course, having a reliable and professional development support team handling your store maintenance and website updates will minimize any shopping cart problems, but it’s always smart business to be hands-on with your online store. Even in the absence of any technical problems, it’s still a good idea to run through things and keep the customer experience fresh and up-to-date. Never just assume that if your shopping cart worked ok yesterday, it still will today. Check, check and triple check.

 
But we didn’t stop with just their main online store. The latest and most exciting development with Restaurant Depot has been the creation of several prototype in-store kiosks, which feature a cloned version of their primary website and allow customers to easily search for available products both in store and online. This gives customers a much wider choice of equipment and supply items then just their local neighborhood warehouse can provide. If the Kiosk prototypes are successful, Restaurant Depot hopes to roll them out to most of their regional stores.  For us at Durrani, this project was a huge success for many reasons – one of which is that it demonstrates the strength of the MIVA Merchant e-commerce platform. Clients always ask us if MIVA is the right choice for their business and The RD Store is a great example that shows MIVA can keep up with the best of them and perform at an enterprise-level that will grow as big and as fast as your business.

Here at Durrani, we are still working our way through the latest features and how best to use them, but so far the admin interface is a welcome improvement.

The upgrade to 5.5 is free for current users of MIVA Merchant 5.0 and is only $99 for users of previous versions until May 31st. The upgrade is automatic on 5.0 installation when you run the upgrade wizard in the admin area. Customers running versions older then 5.0 who have heavily customized their store with modules and OpenUI configurations, should think through the impact of upgrading and make sure they take into consideration everything that needs to be changed for an efficient migration. Open UI modules, design templates and all modules from versions older then 5.0 are not compatible.

For a complete list of the latest features and fixes click the link below to view the complete post.

Issues addressed with MIVA Merchant update production-5:

The headlines frame

• New Feature: Revamped UI
• Miva Merchant UI has been redesigned to focus on "click efficiency".
• Merchants may now submit the form by clicking the Enter key on Search/Pagination boxes, QuickFind and the Order-Number based sorting features.

• New Feature: SEO Settings
• *Tab can be found in the Domain Settings.
• Merchants have the ability to configure the global settings for .htaccess rewrite rules.
• Merchants have the ability to Enable/Disable Sitemap (Creates a new page "SMAP").

• New Feature: META Tag Settings for Products and Categories
• *Tabs can be found on individual Product & Category screens.
• Merchants can specify the META Description & META Keywords for each product/category.
• Added new component "prodctgy_meta".
• Updated PROD & CTGY pages to load prodctgy_meta component.

• New Feature: Launchpad
• *Settings can be found in the top frame "Configure Shortcuts" link.
• Merchants have the ability to configure 5 internal/external Shortcut links + Home (starting) page.
• QuickFind feature (Allows quick searching of products/categories/customers/orders).

• New Feature: Frameworks
• *Tab can be found in Store Settings.
• Merchants have the ability to Add/Apply/Save/Delete the state of their runtime as a framework.
• Additional framework(s) provided by Miva Merchant will be available in the upcoming streams.

• New Feature: Dreamweaver Import/Export.
• *Tab can be found in Store Settings.
• ***Requires Miva Merchant Dreamweaver Plugin.
• Designers/Merchants have the ability to Export their pages into Dreamweaver format.
• They can then edit those pages in Dreamweaver and import them back into Miva Merchant.
• Import/Export options added to the Pages screen.

• New Feature: External CSS files.
• *Settings can be found in the Head Tag Content/CSS tab.
• Merchants may now upload one or more external CSS files. CSS files may be used as a "Skin" in Miva Merchant CSS Framework (coming soon).

• New Feature: Number-based sorting control.
• Categories and Products have the ability to sort the order through keying in the desired order numbers instead of clicking the up & down arrows.

• New Feature: Product Attribute Template.
• *Tab can be found on every Page the product_attributes component is assigned.
• Merchants now have the ability to alter the Product Attribute Template.

• New Feature: Customer HTML-Based Email.
• *Settings can be found on the Order Fulfillment Settings screen.
• Merchants now have the ability to create HTML Template based emails.

• New Feature: Product List "Product Columns" field.
• *Option can be found on any Product List page (PROD, PLST, CTGY, SRCH).
• This field allows merchants to specify the number of columns they wish to display their products in.

• New Feature: Enhanced Order Processing.
• Orders and Batches are now displayed in a formatted Batch Edit List (Newest first).
• Create Batch has been moved to the Orders Tab.
• Added Next/Previous/First/Last buttons to Edit Order screen.
• External Payment Links that were listed under Order Processing previously, are now listed in their own menu Payment Links.

• New Feature: Enhanced Page navigation.
• Edit Item screen now contains the Pages tab. Merchants may now assign/unassign pages from an item.
• Next/Previous/First/Last buttons were added to Edit Page screen.

• Other improvements:
• Software state. Merchants can now see if their software is up-to-date or if there are updates available at the bottom of left navigation frame.
• Headlines frame. This frame contains headlines & urgent messages and appears above the Main Contents frame.
• HTML profile component.
  • This component controls the doctype declaration and the HTML tag; with the ability to specify an xhtml namespace.
  • This component replaces all HTML tags with a call to html_profile.
  • HTML Profile settings are global.
• Added – Link to Miva Merchant website in Sitemap and Global Header & Footer.
• setup.mvc "Database Selection" step now defaults to mySQL.
• setup.mvc "Activate Upgrade License" step is no longer available.
• setup.mvc License Errors should now send users to the License Step.
• When running admin.mvc for the first time, Add Store screen becomes the new home page.
• Order Fulfillment Modules are now installed in the Add Store process.
• DEVAT has been renamed to European VAT.
• Statetax and USCurrency modules are now the default of Add Store screen if the merchant’s country is U.S.
• European VAT, Generic Currency and kilograms are now the default of Add Store screen if the merchant’s country is United Kingdom.
• /export/ directory is now created during the Add Store process.
• Miva_Merchant_API_Version variable has been changed to 5.50. This change should not disrupt existing 3rd party modules.
• Added confirmation box for Edit Page >> Item Tab >> Unassign item.
• Added confirmation box for Edit Item >> Pages Tab >> Unassign page.
• Removed MIVA Ad Center feature from Miva Merchant.
• Removed Store Wizards from the Main screen.
• Miva Mailer and Miva Submit have been removed from the Left Navigation menu.

• Bug Fixes:
• Fixed a runtime bug that caused $0.00 orders in the event the customer is on the OPAY page and finishes the order after their basket has expired.
• Fixed a bug in which product attributes were not showing up properly on the Upsale screen.
• Fixed a bug where adding sub-categories failed to retain the category parent.
• Fixed a bug where Edit Customer screen would always show "Add Customer" in the title.
• Fixed a bug in Flat File Category Import module in which empty parent category codes could fail the import process.
• Fixed bugs in provisioning system for component modules.
• The Domain Settings Add Angle Brackets to Email Addresses field now updates properly under mySQL.