Admin Feature > Add Documents (to product) + Grab Remote Doc, etc

[habreu]

This could be a series of features to build out or for a 3rd party developer. We have our own workflow for this now but for stores that post documents with products i.e. product overview, technical data sheet, material data safety sheet, mounting template etcit would be great to be able to easily upload these documents, give them a friendly name, assign them to products and if you really want a medal show them in a popup with download link.

Along these lines I see someone on our site linked to some documents directly on a manufacturer's site, said links are now broken, so other useful features would be;

-link to remote document, but have an option to download and reference it locally
-schedule a job that would periodically check the link for a remote document and let the admin see 'No Change' or 'Document Missing' or 'Document Changed' so the admin can decide to not update when a document is missing (or to search and change the remote document url if it has been moved, updated or renamed by the site we were getting it from)

Not sure how many stores have supporting documents with products but offering the idea.

[dreamingdigital]

This might be too simple of an answer but you can set a product custom field of the 'image upload' type. It supports PDF (or it used to, if not you can ask Miva via support ticket.) Then you can have all that already I think... other than the scheduled task to see if they exist, but they should cause they're files on your site now.

[habreu]

Thanks. We use custom fields and FTP to handle this so we have a work flow that functions, just thought that if we are talking about features (or 3rd party apps) this would be nice. In fact I originally was using a CMS that had a nice file upload feature to upload and manage the files, then just generating a link which I used in Miva but everybody was 'confused' by the two seperate admins I guess and kept asking me how, or uploading/emailing files to me so I gave up.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

...whats wrong with using the digital download feature of miva?

[habreu]

Not really familiar with it -will have to have a look. I made assumptions about it based on the name, haven't looked at the feature set to see if it can do what I suggest.

[habreu]

Just gave it a test. Works good for replacing the bit I was using FTP for anyway - thanks.

While I'm exploring this does anyone know where I would find a list of all variables associated with this i.e. if I wanted to grab the file name?

In the email I see

&mvte:digitaldownload:url;
&mvte:digitaldownload:formatted_max_downloads;
&mvte:digitaldownload:formatted_expiration;

Since I'm not a programmer and just fiddle with this stuff, is there an object I can iterate through (like products, items, options etc) so I could do something like spit out a list of all digital downloads for a product(s), or category (ies)? Might be able to do something like what I suggested then.

fyi> this is what I mean on our PROD page. I would think that a lot of stores need docs like warranties, links to externasl resources, templates, technical specs, images, color charts, sound files and so on for certain products. We currently use customfields and I FTP file then paste in URL. This works fine for us so we won't be in the market but thought this might be a nice feature out of the box for Miva, or a good 3rd party addon for someone. I guess it depends on type of store.

[oliverands]

I don't think you could do this with the digital download function in Miva because that only generates a link once an order is completed and it only allows for one file/link to be created.

I think custom fields and FTP is the best way to go here.

[habreu]

Ah, thank you. I tested it with one and worked fine - didn't even dawn on me to try adding multiples. In any case my solutions works for us, just thought others might need some 'related documents' on their product pages.