Support FAQs: Miva Merchant

The official Miva Merchant manuals are available to download here.

Please refer to the WorldPay FAQs section.

This is usually caused when you are logged in over your secure admininstration connection (address begins with https). Try logging out, and log-in using your standard (http) connection.

Plug-in modules add extra functionality to your standard Miva store — from tighter control over the appearance of your store, to gathering extra information from customers and useful store administration features (such as enhanced inventory monitoring). There are literally hundreds available, most of which are provided by the following vendors:

• www.mvcool.com
• Viking Coders
• Modstop Inc.
• Netblazon
• Copernicus Business Systems

Most modules are simple to install and configure, although some may require the Open User Interface to be installed on your store. (What's this?)

The Open User Interface (usually referred to as OUI) is best described as a "layer" that sits on top of the main Miva program. It was developed to allow Miva programmers to build more advanced plug-in modules (What's a plug-in module?). Installation of OUI is quite tricky, so we provide this as a service to our customers: purchase and install is covered by a one-off fee of £75+VAT.

Yes, if you have OUI installed (What's this?), you can use a free module available from modStop to hide product weight display if a product has zero weight: Hide Weight Module (requires OUI).

Yes — each product or category that you add to Miva generates its own set of specific links. To display the links, log into your Miva admin area, and navigate to the product or category in question. At the top-right of the product/category edit screen, you will see a "Links" icon: click on this icon to open a new window, which will display the urls associated with that product or category.

The Links icon is available on various screens throughout your Miva admin area — another useful set of urls is found if you click on the Links icon when in the main store edit screen: this will provide links for the store front, product list and basket contents pages etc.

Yes, it is possible to control certain elements (e.g. text appearance) of Miva using Style Sheets. If you were to upload a css file to your root web directory (where is this?) you could link to it by placing the following code in the "Global Header" (found within Miva Admin>Headers and Footers):

<link rel=stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../mystyles.css" media="screen" />

You can edit the store front page by clicking on "Messages" (found within the main right-hand panel in Miva admin), where you will find the "Store Front Welcome" box.

Although the exported file is not saved in the area of your site that is accessible over the web, you will be able to download the file via ftp. Depending on the type of server that you are hosted on, the .dat file will be in one of two places:

• If you see "mainwebsite_html" when you log-in via ftp:
  /var/www/mivadata/Merchant2/00000001/export/
• If you see "users" when you log-in via ftp:
  youruser/mivadata/Merchant2/00000001/export/

Add the following to a .htaccess file (to create a .htaccess file, just type the code below into a text editor, and save as .htaccess):

DirectoryIndex /Merchant2/merchant.mv(c)

Upload it to your main (root) web directory.

This works better than a JavaScript redirect because it is search engine friendly — not all search engine spiders/robots can follow JavaScript redirects.