>Zen and Miva Merchant

If you are looking for the file formats page, it is here. Be warned, it is a 158k page.

Introductory Merchant Tips

Admin Image Uploading Importing Product Files Planning Categories

Image Naming Preparing Products with Access Pack Your Butt Off Join the Mailing Lists

Get Used To The Admin Interface

If you run a Merchant site of any reasonable success you will be spending a lot of time in the Merchant admin interface, especially when first setting up your store. Plus, all your orders will need to be processed through the admin interface, so get used to it. There are one or two really cool free admin add-ons, but generally admin is just something you must tolerate for the time being.

Upload Images Separately

Use any sort of FTP program to move your image and import files to your server. Yes, there is an upload function built-in to Merchant to upload individual image and thumbnail files. Try using it to update 600 products and you'll get the picture. Just find one FTP program or another that floats 'yer boat and use it to move files to/from your server. Using the file upload function inside Merchant admin has been known to lead to insanity.

Pictures' Even A Human Could Name

Plan your thumbnail and image names very carefully. This is a real tar pit waiting to ooze through your shoes. Got only 20-30 products? No big whoop. Got 100-300 products? Good luck. Got 1,000-10,000 products? Plan now or suffer later.

Merchant wants all your graphic files to be stored in one place. On the one hand that seems convenient, on another it leads to unmanageable clutter. Since Merchant really needs two graphics per product, this means a 1,000 product site will have a folder with (at least) 2,000 files in it. That's dumb enough, but not as dumb as you will feel when you wade through them; trying to remember what you called this GIF or that JPG. And sorting them in any manner similar to reality is almost impossible. So plan them carefully before you pain yourself into a corner.

Check our tips page to find one easy, automatic solution to this problem.

Preparing Your Product File With MS Access, Excel, etc.

There are many Merchant sites which are developed by folks using MS Access & other xBaseIII-compatible file editors. But we of the MMG would not recommend it. There is no way to directly import or convert native MS Access (or anything other than ASCII) files. So the more closely you work with your product files at the ASCII level - the better.

That is not to say you cannot or should not use Access or Excel to pre-manipulate your product files. It's just that if you are not a "power user" of Access or Excel, your learning curve might be much higher. If your goal is to setup and maintain multiple Merchant installations, you had better learn a pro dB program. But if your goal is just to suffer through a single Merchant site, stay close to the prize and ignore the fancy add-ons when you can.

There are a few high-quality text editors' around that can handle most of the tasks you will approach in working with your product files to get them into Merchant. Besides, it is more painful to work with your product list as ASCII text. But doing it in color makes it hurt better and the syntax coloring features of programs like TextPad and EditPlus impresses people who see you work.

This will be repeated many times later, but for now remember: You cannot edit your Merchant data files directly except through the Admin interface. Get over it.

But there is a common ground. You can use an excellent Access-based utility called StoreMan which can manipulate the badoozle out of product files.

Importing Product Files

This one needs a whole section, but until the cake is ready here is some icing:

	Never use a comma or tab as the import delimiter. Others will disagree; let 'em suffer. Just remember: "It is right to use a pipe." Nearly all talented, attractive, successful, and adored Merchant developers use the pipe character (¦) as the magic delimiter. Maybe you live in Baboozleland and use the pipe in your language. Tough titty. Ain't nobody else using it in common text or practice. If they are, they probably are deranged or think it is a lower case L. And it's safer than using a tilde (~) as a delimiter 'cause those are regularly used in URLs now. Another semi-safe character is the carret (^), but it is not as cool as the pipe and does not sound nearly as macho.
	Pre-fill all fields in each record, if you can. Do not expect Merchant to follow whatever bizarre logic tells you "but it should have a default of ___ if it was blank". There's no psychic network here friends. If you do not tell it what you want in each field of a record you have no room to bitch about what Merchant sticks in there for you. For christsakes it's only a few years old; and kids don't know diddly about 'defaults'. Except with diapers.
	Keep your fields in Merchant's import order, only for sanity. Some of the guesses about Merchant's file formats are here. Caveat emptor. Do not expect the field names to be presented in your choice of order; like alphabetically or their order in the admin editor or something. That might lead to pleasure. Merchant wants to see them in the order:
Field Sample MM Version Max Size 1. Product Code WIDG254 1, 2, 3 50 chars 2. Name Blue Widgets 1, 2, 3 100 chars 3. Thumbnail URL WIDG254.gif 1, 2, 3 254 chars 4. Image URL WIDG254.jpg 1, 2, 3 254 chars 5. Price 20.50 (or 20.5) 1, 2, 3 10.2 number 6. Cost 11.50 2, 3 10.2 number 7. Description These are blue widgets. 1, 2, 3 humongous 8. Weight (in pounds) 2.00 1, 2, 3 2.2 number 9. Taxable? Yes 1, 2, 3 1 (boolean) 10. Category Code CATE01 1, 2, 3 50 chars The few lines ready for import could look like: WIDG254¦Blue Widgets¦WIDG254.gif¦WIDG254.jpg¦20.5¦11.5¦These are blue widgets.¦2¦Yes¦CATE01 WIDG726¦Red Widgets¦WIDG726.gif¦WIDG726.jpg¦22.95¦10.25¦These are red widgets.¦2¦Yes¦CATE01 GR2324¦Green Widgets¦GR2324.gif¦GR2324.jpg¦24¦12¦These are green widgets.¦2¦Yes¦CATE03 Some notes: 1. For safety's sake, never use anything but letters and numbers in your product code, thumbnail and image names, or in the category code. 2. Always use the category code - not the category name. 3. Use the pipe ¦ delimeter.

Pack, Pack, Pack Your Butt Off

Packing your Merchant files is a 'good thing'. Do it regularly. Even though it does not hurt very much, it makes your Merchant server work hard in a way that will benefit you. Pack your mall and your store files (in that order) each and every time you import, rename, delete or move products or categories. You will not harm or rearrange your Merchant installation by packing the data files. For a site of up to 1,000 products it would be good to plan a packing you files at least once a month; weekly if you could.

What packing does: packing database files is a normal thing in their lives. MS Access calls it "rebuilding" your files, other programs call it other things, but it usually means the same: the files are rebuilt and the old one's replaced with the new, cleanly-constructed files. When you are working with a database (at least, databases like Merchant's) and do stuff like delete a record (in your case, a product), a little flag is attached to the record marking it for deletion. It stays there until the next time the file is packed then the record flagged for deletion is simply not included in the new, rebuilt file. Packing files is not unique to Merchant, but instead to the file format type it uses. Kind of.

Think of it this way: your Merchant product database is like a large filing cabinet with a lot of drawers. The records in these drawers are read from regularly, but when you 'delete' a record all that is done is a little red Post-It note is attached to the file. Next time they come along and clean out the drawers, the red tagged entries are just not put back in. But no one can access the stuff in the cabinet when they are cleaning (packing) it, so it is usually not something you are able to do all the time. And if you have 50,000 products in your database, packing ain't going to happen too quickly.

Tip: Pack big databases off-line. Install Miva Mia and Merchant on your computer and do the packing there.

Join The Mailing Miva Lists

If you are still expecting to find some treasure trove of information about Miva and Merchant somewhere on the net, give up. You will not find too many sites (so far) that will help educate you on how to use Merchant, although a little more is there for Miva as a language. But if you are expecting to find documentation like Cold Fusion or user groups like PHP, you won't find them. If you do not like it you are welcome to launch a Miva site of your own. Nobody said that you couldn't.

So join and get to know the Miva mailing lists, then figure out how to use filters in your email program. Most masochists use Eudora specifically for it's filter capability (mimicked by everyone). Expect it to be a rather long and painful learning process, and this is good.

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