Weird things done with Store Morph

[immy79]

Hey Everyone,

In my time playing with MIVA Merchant 5 and SMT, I had created some really cool and interesting "stores". Just playing with the template capabilities and seeing what I could do. I discovered pretty quickly that MIVA Merchant 5 was very flexible, and could do more than just create a really cool store. It could actually function as a pseudo Content Management System.

So, after playing around with it, I was able to create a couple different types of sites with it. Here's what I've made, all powered solely by MIVA Merchant 5...

1. A blog. Each product becomes a blog entry. Each category is a date.
2. A photo gallery. Products are the photos and the categories are albums.
3. A members-only site. Used conditionals to show specific content to people when logged in.

What other types of sites have you made or thought about making using MIVA Merchant 5? It could be real interesting to see how creative people can get with this.

[wba2610]

I am very interested with the blog idea, how could I set up my own blog on my website? Would the blog be listed in the product page or have its own category?

[immy79]

Well, the way I set it up, I wasn't using MIVA Merchant 5 for it's e-commerce capabilities at all. I had disabled the shopping cart, the checkout process, etc. I then customized the layout of the product display page template so it would look more like a journal entry.

With each entry into the "blog", I would simply add it as if it were a new product in the admin. I only used the code, title, and description fields.

I didn't try incorporating it with the store features also. But I'm sure it could be done by jsut creating new apges for the blog entry layout. The only tricky aprt would be that your product lsitings and your blog entries would be in the same section of your admin. On the storefront side, you could use some fancy conditional to supress certain products, maybe if they had a certain name or code. That would help make sure the actual products and blog entries don't get mixed together, like on the product list page.

[max]

3. A members-only site. Used conditionals to show specific content to people when logged in.

How did you do that?

[Vic - WolfPaw Computers]

Fairly easy by setting multiple condition to check the value of the customer login name, probably inside a conditional to check if they are logged in.

Then setting the content for each condition (login name).

[Brandon MUS]

Sure is an expensive blogging platform :D

[immy79]

Yea, well, it's obviously not designed for it, but it could work. And if you wanted to starting selling stuff later, you could do that too. Maybe to help pay for the software... ;)

I was just kinda showcasing what is possible with the software. The new MIVA Merchant 5 makes it a lot easier to use the system more as a content management solution that has really good e-commerce capabilities. With older version, you were really limited on what you could do out-of-the-box and it really was strictly e-commerce. SMT and the page templates really open that all up.