The theme of this year’s Miva Merchant conference, while somewhat cheesy, couldn’t have been more appropriate. Less than six months ago, we were seriously considering finding another e-commerce platform. Just to give you an idea of how big of a deal that is, MC2 has been working with Miva Merchant since 1998. For those of you who are mathematically challenged, that’s ten years! In computer years, that is a lifetime.

Back…

To explain why “Back to the Future” was such an appropriate theme for the conference, let me give you some background. For those of you who aren’t aware, FindWhat.com, a search-marketing focused company, purchased Miva Merchant in 2004. They made a few good moves at first, acquiring MVCool and re-branding it as MivaCentral as well as releasing Miva Merchant 5, but for the next few years they seemed to basically run Merchant into the ground. They alienated module developers, outsourced support, and almost destroyed the community that made it such a success in the first place.

…to the Future

In August of 2007, it was announced that Miva Merchant had been purchased from FindWhat.com (now Miva, Inc) by several of the management team who had worked so hard to make the product a success in the past. Within a month, the new team managed to bring tech support back in-house and drop-kicked the ridiculous outsourced design services that had pissed off the community so much.

The conference? I’m getting to it!

My cohort and I arrived in San Diego Thursday night after a whopping hour on a Southwest flight from Sacramento. After getting our rental car and checking in to the hotel, we headed down to the beach and hung out just long enough for me decide we need to open an MC2 Design, San Diego division and then were off to Thursday night’s mixer where we were given not only a whole bag of schwag, but also free beer and a chance to meet the infamous Baron Bob.

Basically everything I went to the conference to hear was revealed in Rick Wilson’s keynote on Friday morning. During the keynote, Rick revealed Merchant 5.5 and I think you’d be hard pressed to find anybody who attended who wasn’t completely blown away. I’d just like to go over a few of the features that were revealed in 5.5.

• Skins - Easily one of the coolest new features in 5.5 is the skins system. What it does is allow you to completely change the look and feel of your Merchant store with the click of a button. If you are familiar with Wordpress, Miva’s skin system is similar. We will be making heavy use of this feature.
• Dreamweaver integration - Dreamweaver integration was promised years ago, but it looks like they finally pulled it off. The way this works, is you export the pages you’d like to edit and simply open them up in Dreamweaver. From here you can edit Merchant’s templates as if they were simply html documents. In order for this to work you will need to download a free Dreamweaver extension that will be made available via Merchant’s website.
• Completely re-designed interface - The new interface is wonderful. The first impression I had of Miva Merchant was not good and I have to say one of the main reasons was the interface looked like it came from 1992.
• Built-in SEO features - In the past it has only been possible to customize Merchant’s URLs by manually creating a mod_rewrite file. The new version has this built right into the admin interface
• No more black boxes - Every piece of html / smt template code in Merchant 5.5 is editable through the interface.
• Full CSS support - The new version comes with a completely css-based skin and the layout is based on divs instead of tables.
• Simple administration mode has been removed - Simple administration mode was the stupidest feature available and it was on by default. In fact, advanced administration mode is a lot simpler than simple administration mode. It has been completely removed from Merchant 5.5.
• One-page checkout - That’s right. One page checkout is built-in in Merchant 5.5. It is not manditory, but it’s available. I can’t recall if this is a “coming soon” feature or if it is already implemented
• Configurable error pages - All error pages in Merchant 5.5 are completely customizeable
• Unnecessary whitespace removed - If you have worked with Merchant before, I’m sure you are aware of the fifteen or twenty blank lines that are output before any html on every page. While this doesn’t actually make any difference, it is an annoyance I’m happy that I no longer have to deal with.

What is really impressive about all these features is that they were able to pull them off without breaking a single thing. Merchant will be a streamed update and it will not have any effect (other than the updates) on your extisting store(s).

Just to be honest, once I was told they’d be posting slides online, I stopped taking notes. I know there are other features, but I can’t be sure if they’re on the way or if they are included in 5.5. I’ve told you the best of it anyway. I’ll post links to the slides when they are available. Also, as soon as Michael gets me the photos took of us at the conference, I’ll post those as well.

I’d go into detail about the conference sessions, but honestly they were a little lacking. Fortunately the news of Merchant 5.5 as well as the extremely positive experience I had with the new owners were enough to make up for it. The photo to the right is new Executive Vice President, Rick Wilson with Michael. I missed out on getting my photo taken with them because I was discussing code with the dotComHost guys. There is photo of us with those guys on the way.

One small disappointment is that Merchant 5.5 was not released on the day of the conference as was expected, but this is actually a good thing. The new owners decided they weren’t going to release the new version until it has been thoroughly beta tested and documented. These are two things past versions really could have done a better job of, so it’s good to see them learning from their mistakes.

Leslie Nord of eMediaSales has posted tons of photos of the event, so go check ‘em out!

UPDATE: Pamela Hazelton of Design Extend has written an article along the same theme as this one, only better. Check it out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Client News, Miva. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.