Miva 9 VENTING!

[mjstonez]

I'm going to vent. Sorry if I offend some - but after nearly 15 years using Miva and knowing it like the back of my hand I find this new admin, while pleasing on the eye....otherwise slow and somewhat sloppy. Sure it looks good, but compared to the old admin, it's clunky with too many steps for a simple actions. For someone who has 40,000 products to keep stock updated, I find many aspects a step backwards. Why cant I easily view 1000 products at at time like the old way, why do I have to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll, and wait to load and load and load and load. Why can't I copy and paste to excel anymore? Why can't I sort by a custom product field? Why do I have to have nearly 10px of padding between one row of products to the next? I don't think anyone cares what the admin looked like before - sure it looked like DOS but it was easy and quick. I understand the need to update with the times but why force me to use the new admin? Why not give me the choice?

Now on the other hand, the new merchant side of things is slick and fast I am excited for our new responsive site to launch soon...on that side Miva gets an A+.

time for a drink.

Mike

[Rick Wilson]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

I understand the need to update with the times but why force me to use the new admin? Why not give me the choice?

Very simple, it's not just a look and feel update. The old "admin" made it slower for us to write new features and keep development moving along. So if it was just a Skin, I'd agree with you, but it's so much more than that.

Also if you'll take the time to list out what's slowing you down, I suspect you'll find there's ways to do it better/faster, etc... in the new Admin.

I assure you we didn't do anything just for looks.

[mjstonez]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

Rick, In the old admin you could easily search for and and view 20, 40, 60, 500, or 1000 products on a single page and use the find function in the browser to look for and highlight certain data, in my case pertinent changes in a product custom data field. Now with the continuous scrolling feature only a few products are visible on the screen at any given time - items that are not visible are not loaded so you can't use the browser search function because you cant search lower or higher than the visible data. And, since there is no way to sort by a custom product field we are forced to "select all", download to the csv, make the change, then upload with flat data, instead of just turning off a product we no longer need active - a MUCH slower process when dealing with 20-30 individual stock reports daily. This is a huge difference in processing times. It's just way fancier than it should be....I want to be able to view as many lines of products on one page as I want - like we've been doing for 15 years....

[Rick Wilson]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

Two things.

1. You can turn Pagination Back on.

2. We have a new feature coming in 9.0003 (Next month) that I think will solve all of your pain in this area. It essentially allows for CTRL-F type functionality on the infinite scroll screens.

[mjstonez]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

Rick, How do I turn it back on? Pagination...

[Rick Wilson]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

Under Users -> Settings -> Always Use Pagination

[mjstonez]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

Pagination only shows as many products as can fit on one page since the css controlling the browser/page does not allow for the browser scroll function....

[Brennan]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

You are correct. Turning on pagination does not change the products per page. These will always only show as many as will fit on your screen. But if you didn't like the way infinite scroll works, pagination gives you a more familiar option.

The update Rick was referring to, expands the miva list search, so you can search for a product and it will take you to its spot within the list and even highlight it in yellow similar to using ctrl +f on the keyboard.

[mjstonez]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

The update sounds helpful, but being able to view as many or as few items on a page as I want with browser controlled scrolling and/or being able to sort by a custom product field would be just as, if not more useful, in my particular case....

[Brennan]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

Mive 5 never had the ability to sort by a custom product field. How were you doing that previously?

[josiahjg]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

2. We have a new feature coming in 9.0003 (Next month) that I think will solve all of your pain in this area. It essentially allows for CTRL-F type functionality on the infinite scroll screens.

Looking forward to this! This is a much needed, basic feature.

[mjstonez]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

No, There was no way to sort by a custom field before, but there was no need for it either. Now that you have limited the amount of viewable products in the area any additional ways to view and sort would be enormously helpful. Seems to me that is should not be hard to be able to turn on pagination and be able to view more products at once...like before. again, with all the steps forward this is a step backward - at least for us.

[kayakbabe]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

I am feeling mjstonez frustration too. So I"m chiming in.

I do in miva 5.5 exactly what mjstonez did as a work around for the fields not being included. I set my list to show custom fields and I set my default count for the rows in admin to show to 500. Then very simply I use the browsers search feature to find what I want. With this I didn't have to bother waiting for Miva to include a built in search for custom fields. The browser search is way faster as the stuff is already on the browser screen.

I agree again with mjstonez, I don't like the product admin in the miva 9 either. It is "UNWIELDY" or maybe "KLUNKY" is a better word.

I suppose the new product admin is great if you have very few products. Most small startups probably don't have many. So it would be good for them. But they can't afford to pay what you are charging now either. Since you are catering to businesses with a little more money now. Designing the admin for people with few products doesn't make much sense. IMHO.

I bought this up during beta/dev testing and I still feel this way. It bugged me so much, I just dropped out of sight. Now I am being forced to update my stores. Okay, I can deal with that. But it's damn frustrating that the admin is a step backwards in terms of ease of use. Sometimes looking simpler is not simpler at all. The 5.5 admin just needed a way to have search include the custom fields if they were checked for display on the screen and it would have been perfect. That's all it needed. And that is way simpler than what has happened.

will this new psuedo ctrl-f include the custom fields?

[kayakbabe]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

that said, can we put in some css in the admin side to change the padding and stuff. I want to see more on the screen at a time too. It is such a waste of screen real estate. I don't care about pretty I want functional and being able to tone down some of that white space would be good.

[mjstonez]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

EXACTLY. K.I.S.S

Please add this to the Miva 9 Wish List.

1. Choose as many or as few products on the list as we want to see at any time browser scroll would also be best for this.
2. Things need to be tight without waste of white space
3. Browser handled search is best but an alt method would be okay

Just return the functionality of 5.5 to this area would make many people happy.