As I was working on a Miva Merchant store today, I needed to show the user a link, but only if they were currently logged in. I know I have done this before, but I couldn’t find the code for the life of me. So I went to trusty ol’ Google and typed in “Miva Merchant detect if user logged in” and several other terms only to come up with nothing. So I dug through several other Merchant sites to find the code. I finally found it and have decided to post it here in case somebody else has the same problem.

UPDATE: Apparently you need to check that g.Basket:CUST_ID is not equal to zero. At first my solution only checked that it wasn’t null which was flawed.

<mvt:if expr="NOT ISNULL g.Basket:CUST_ID AND g.Basket:CUST_ID NE 0">
    Welcome back, &mvte:global:customer:login;!
<mvt:else>
    Hello anonymous user!
</mvt:if>

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.

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MC2 Design’s development team attended the MIVA Merchant 2008 Conference in San Diego, California, held at the Marina Village Conference Centers on Feb 28,29 and March 1st. MIVA Merchant announced exciting new features with its pending release of version 5.5, which released in Beta March 2nd and is slated for streamed release as an upgrade from 5.0, early to mid April 2008. MC2 came away from the event very encouraged about the vision and future of Miva Merchant as an enterprise level application. The management team of MIVA Merchant provided a very informative, approachable experience, letting merchants, developers, and designers know that they are here to stay. For additional information on this conference and version 5.5 see this article

The technique of “zebra-striping” tables and other data-centric html elements has been around for a long time. It is an easy way to make mundane, hard-to-read elements pretty and readable. You can see an example of this technique below. Notice how each row is a difference color? This is what is referred to as “zebra-striping”.

There has been many times I’ve wished to get this effect within Miva Merchant 5. Luckily, Merchant’s SMT template system or “store-morph” technology allows for this. In fact, it’s pretty simple.

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Miva Small Business Solutions, creator of Miva Merchant announced on Monday that they have been purchased by a former Miva Small Business management team led by Russell Carroll.
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I would just like to take a moment to point out a few of the things that drive me insane about Miva Merchant modules. If you are a Miva developer, please take note.

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As I’ve grown familiar with Miva Merchant, I’ve become very wary of Miva SMT entities. SMT entities are basically to Miva Merchant what variables are to any other language. If you have developed anything in PHP, you are likely aware of the security implications of having register_globals turned on. In Miva Merchant, the same sort of implications exist because Miva Merchant converts all CGI environment variables into SMT entities (variables) upon startup.
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