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    Using Miva for content management

    Hello,

    I have lots of photos of projects we have done, and they keep increasing. Rather than create hundreds of pages thathave photos and a description of the project I was wondering if
    a) I could use a Miva Category (inactive) to hold all the "products"
    b) Use products to hold the image(s) and description (but not have the add to basket and all that)
    c) May be that means I create a new category page which calls a new type product page
    d) use short urls/htaccess to make these images be findable and have decent SEO properties.

    Why am I doing this? So that the content can be in a database and I dont have a million extra pages...

    Has anyone done anything like this before?
    Is there a module or sample code that would make my life easier?

    Thanks
    Sam

    #2
    Re: Using Miva for content management

    My first impression (without knowing more details) is that you would have an easier time using wordpress to do what you want.

    Suppose you are a home remodeling company and you want to show potential clients homes that you have remodeled in the past.

    You could have a post in wordpress in each home and then a gallery with as many photos for each page as you would like. There are lots of different lightbox style galleries to choose from.

    It would be a lot easier to do in wordpress (provided, of course, that you are willing / able to learn how to set up wordpress).

    I am sure that you could do it in miva merchant as well if you really wanted to. However, I just thing that at the end of the day, if you DON'T need the ecommerce functionality of Miva Merchant for those particular pages, I would do it on a blog in wordpress ON THE SAME DOMAIN (not on a separate domain / subdomain) for better SEO purposes.

    Wordpress also has the added benefit of having a responsive design (for certain templates - not all templates in wordpress are responsive). So if you get lots of visitors on mobile devices, that is a big plus. Plus there a ton of FREE plugins that will make working with wordpress easier than with Miva for content management (my humble opinion).

    The main drawback is that you if you want to have the same navigation bar / category tree as on your Miva merchant page, you would need to hard code it. That can be as simple as just going to the view source and copying the relevant source code, though, so that wouldn't stop me from using wordpress.

    Hope this helps.
    Last edited by Siamese-Dream.Com; 07-26-14, 10:08 AM.
    Mark Romero
    ~~~~~~~~

    Comment


      #3
      Re: Using Miva for content management

      Sam,

      Your basic idea is petty sound, and probably wouldn't take too much effort to create/manage. I'd consider using the Alternate Category/ Product fields to allow you to use different page templates for these types of pages. That will make implementation cleaner as you wont have to use conditionals on the Cat/Prod page templates to hide the parts you don't need.
      Bruce Golub
      Phosphor Media - "Your Success is our Business"

      Improve Your Customer Service | Get MORE Customers | Edit CSS/Javascript/HTML Easily | Make Your Site Faster | Get Indexed by Google | Free Modules | Follow Us on Facebook
      phosphormedia.com

      Comment


        #4
        Re: Using Miva for content management

        Using Miva for this is definitely feasible. Each product can be an article; you just have to fiddle with the page template to remove the price, Add To Basket button, etc. The product description, as well as the header and footer, have unlimited length; so you can put a big chunk of HTML in there. You can use categories and related-product settings for navigation.
        Kent Multer
        Magic Metal Productions
        http://TheMagicM.com
        * Web developer/designer
        * E-commerce and Miva
        * Author, The Official Miva Web Scripting Book -- available on-line:
        http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/IS...icmetalproducA

        Comment


          #5
          Re: Using Miva for content management

          Thank you all for your replies. I have been experimenting with this on our dev site and I will report back on progress. I think the way I am proceeding is
          a) Alternate category page so it is simpler and does not have ecommerce stuff
          b) Sub cats to have different sets of photos
          c) Alternate Product page that will have a different photo size
          d) Messing around with htaccess to create the kind of short urls I want
          e) Putting the appropriate title tag in etc. for SEO purposes
          f) Putting a descriptive product name for SEO purposes (alt tag)

          This way I can have all the stuff in a single database to backup and it is easy to add more photos in the required categories.

          Further I can provide a link to these photos from product pages

          The only other question I have is whether to pop up a different window and a CLOSE button or find some easy way to navigate between photos in a certain category. I will play with this and let you guys check it out when done.

          Thanks again
          Sam

          Comment


            #6
            Re: Using Miva for content management

            "e) Putting the appropriate title tag in etc. for SEO purposes
            f) Putting a descriptive product name for SEO purposes (alt tag)"
            If you are going to have lots of product pages where the only thing on there is a photo, an SEO-optimized title tag, and an SEO-optimized alt-text, you are most likely setting yourself up for a Panda slap by google.
            Mark Romero
            ~~~~~~~~

            Comment


              #7
              Re: Using Miva for content management

              As for using Miva for content management; you can create products and assign them to an inactive category. Then you can do just about anything using ToolKit. Here are a couple examples that we have created using the Random Product function:

              http://www.puzzleboxstore.com/large-...box/33397.html

              Two categories: One for Trivia (fresh content for the search engines) and Customer Comments. Refresh the page and they change.

              http://uncommontreasures.net/categor...e-history.html

              At the bottom of the page, random products from the related category in the store are listed. (this might work to sprinkle your projects throughout your site) Refresh the page and they change.

              http://www.latinartmall.com/

              Refresh the page and you will see all the content changes, so the homepage is never the same twice and requires no upkeep.

              These all use the same concept. Create a product (and in our case the products are blocked from coming up in a site search) and pull any fields you want and put them anywhere.
              Jim Sisk
              Uncommon Treasures

              Comment


                #8
                Re: Using Miva for content management

                Jim,

                I was just struggling with active and inactive categories. would you be able to share some toolkit code to access inactive categories. I have not used toolkit much.

                But the basic idea is to have a easy place to store all our project photos in their own sub cats with a project description.

                At the moment I have them all in a long page and it is painful to keep it up, change it etc.

                If I make it an active category it shows up where I dont want it to. if I make it inactive it says the category is unavailable and I could not find the place where the error message is generated (to make an exception).

                Thanks in advance for your help. Just a little hint is enough.

                Sam

                Comment


                  #9
                  Re: Using Miva for content management

                  Hi Sam:

                  what do you mean by:

                  If I make it an active category it shows up where I don't want it to.

                  Do you mean it shows up in the category tree and you don't want it to show up there?

                  If so, I think there are a couple of way of having it NOT show up in the category tree.

                  I will try to post an example tomorrow. I have to go home now and get yelled at by the wife...
                  Mark Romero
                  ~~~~~~~~

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Re: Using Miva for content management

                    Sam,

                    The idea of using an inactive category is so it DOESN'T show up on the cat tree. You make the Sub Cats ACTIVE so you can address them directly.

                    _hidden (inactive sub cat)
                    ThisCat (active, you can link to it by using Category_code=ThisCat)

                    No tool kit needed
                    Bruce Golub
                    Phosphor Media - "Your Success is our Business"

                    Improve Your Customer Service | Get MORE Customers | Edit CSS/Javascript/HTML Easily | Make Your Site Faster | Get Indexed by Google | Free Modules | Follow Us on Facebook
                    phosphormedia.com

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Re: Using Miva for content management

                      Sam,

                      Create an inactive category, then build your project section under it. The main inactive category will be hidden AND inaccessable by URL, the sub-categories under it will be hidden (as in not on your menu) but accessable by URL.

                      I would suggest creating an alternate category page and an alternate product page.
                      This will allow you to remove your buy buttons and also layout everything differently if you like.
                      Jim Sisk
                      Uncommon Treasures

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Re: Using Miva for content management

                        Not sure if this can be factored in but I'm setting up Miva's Image Machine now using these instructions. http://www.mivamerchant.com/blog/pr8...-image-machine You can see the test image thumbnails at the top of this page http://www.allfrom1supply.com/mercha..._Code=pnt-cb-1 click to switch images, click the big image to zoom. So maybe your product page could hold multiple related images, clicking to switch and the product would then be an 'album' at the category level if that makes sense.

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