This week Miva Merchant rolled out version 5.5 of their renowned shopping cart application. It's a free upgrade for Miva Merchant users already running version 5.0, and it's offered as a streaming update.

The bad news is that it's quite easy to upgrade. The good news is that it's quite easy to upgrade. Here's what I mean: When you log into your store's administrative interface, depending on your notification settings, you may see a popup window that looks like this:

It looks just like any other streaming upgrade, but this one is significant - it has the power to wreak some havoc on your store. There are a few things in the application, under the hood, that have been changed (for the better). As such, your store may require updates to third-party modules that relied on these changes. And if you upgrade your store without testing it first, your customers may see problems. As always, we highly recommend making upgrades or any other development changes on a development copy of your store (which your host should be able to help you configure, if you don't have one).

But for those of you who are ready, or who are already working on a development copy of your store, it is VERY simple to upgrade. And the benefits are tremendous. Here are a few of the things you'll get with the new Miva Merchant 5.5:

• A much-improved administration interface. It looks better, it takes fewer clicks to get where you need to go, and the old Launchpad application from MivaCentral has been redesigned and built into the application to provide a configurable "shortcut" bar to allow you to get to commonly-used areas inside of the administration tool.
• There are now built-in HTML notification emails for both the customer and the merchant. Plain-text is still available for those who prefer it.
• Frameworks have been added. This has previously been discussed as skins, and it gives you the ability to change the look of your store in a few short clicks. It's meant to be used at design/implementation time; applying a new framework to an already-operating site may remove customized features and possibly make the store inoperable...again, a good reason to have a development copy of your store. It is also expected that developers will begin to offer their own frameworks for distribution
• Dreamweaver support has been added. It requires the Miva Merchant Designer which can be downloaded from Miva Merchant's website.
• Meta Tags for individual products and categories
• Support for URL Rewriting has been included in the base product
• A new sitemap screen has been added

With a feature set like this - and more to come (see the roadmap we published after the conference), there are a lot of good reasons to consider this upgrade. And for users still running Miva Merchant 4, the single benefit of being able to run your store on a MySQL database is reason enough to schedule an upgrade.

If you're interested in having your store upgraded professionally, no matter what version you are currently running, contact us today to discuss your project.

I've been the last 4 days recovering from jetlag and decompressing from the 2008 Miva Merchant conference, held last week at the Marina Village conference center in San Diego. I felt pretty lucky to attend this year, because it had been 4 years since NetBlazon had attended, and 5 years since I had personally made the trip. It was WELL worth it. The conference started out with a social hour of finger foods and cocktails on Thursday night. Our clients who attended didn't make it into town for this event, leaving me with a lot of time to wander around. I met a lot of new end users and developers, and became re-acquainted with people I'd met five years ago. It was great to get the lay of the land.

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Ecommerce consulting firm NetBlazon is proud to announce the acquisition of DoublePlus New Media Marketing. Since 1999, NetBlazon has become one of the world's leading e-business firms with expertise on the Miva Merchant platform. With the acquisition of DoublePlus, NetBlazon expands its capabilities in bringing quality products and services to Miva Merchant clients.

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Last week I started noticing how much use I get out of things that are available for free on the web. The Open Source movement has brought about a lot of good, free software - or donation-ware, if you're serious about Open Source products. There's a number of free things I use, but these are my "Fab 5", the ones I really want to share!

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For a long time, Miva Merchant developers have had to deal with the "exclusive or" situation of handling a certain task within the shopping cart framework, or externally via a PHP script. It's not uncommon to see users question how they can run PHP from within, say, a product description or a category header. The standard answer has always been, "you can't". At the most technical level, this is still true; Miva's virtual machine can't run PHP code. Read the rest of this entry »