WordPress and Miva

[MaritimeLobsterExpress]

We are in the process of having a new website designed and the designer has suggested that we use WordPress for the webpages. He has suggested this because of the admin panel that makes it very easy to edit and create new pages. We need something that we can have full control over and change easily. This obviously would integrate with MIVA as in our current set up. I have read through some posts on this board where others have used it for blogs, etc. but was wondering if there are any limitations to using it for all pages in a website. From what I have read, it seems to be quite popular for this and many web designers are creating new websites based on it. Any comments are appreciated.

[erichar11]

Re: WordPress and Miva

I have been experimenting with this myself on a test site. I really like using wp for all the pages of the site, except the shopping cart pages. Are you planning to use wp for the category and product pages as well? I didn't want to go that far, as Miva does a good job at handling the shopping cart.


One of the things I wanted to do was be able to display products from Miva on wp pages or in the sidebar nav. It was easily accomplished.

[MaritimeLobsterExpress]

Re: WordPress and Miva

That is how i plan to set it up as well. I am only going to use WP for the webpages but use MIVA for the shopping cart end of things. What I really like about WP is being able to maintain the website through the admin panel as opposed to creating separate webpages and uploading them.

My only concern is what kind of impact this has on search engines since the pages are within WP. For example, I know that previously (prior to the update) this was an issue with content within MIVA as well.

Can anyone offer their thoughts on this?

[erichar11]

Re: WordPress and Miva

wp pages can rank really well. If setup several blogs and the site I'm currently thinking about moving to wp as front end on a site that already has a wp blog. It was released in January 2008 with approx. 200 blog pages indexed. (we update the blog daily M-f)

The impact on the search engines should be nothing. It might be better if you update your content on a regular basis. If you new to wordpress, I would suggest this.
- setup wp to automatically ping your content whenever you make a change
- consider using tags as well for your wordpress post and ping those as well
- install a google sitemap generator plugin for wordpress.
- If you haven't already done so, sign up for google webmaster tools and add your sitemap to it. Google will come by eventually and pick up all the pages in your sitemap
- Create a sitemap for your miva products and upload it to google webmaster tools as well.
- install google analytics or your favorite tracking software to understand your stats. There is a wp plugin for google analytics that makes this easy
- if you are moving an existing site, make sure you setup you wp permalinks structure to match your existing structure. Or do redirects.

Hopefully this helps

[skepticwebguy]

Re: WordPress and Miva

One of the things I wanted to do was be able to display products from Miva on wp pages or in the sidebar nav. It was easily accomplished.

I would like to do this. Can you explain a bit about how this can be accomplished? I'm running Miva 5.5 and Wordpress 2.8.

What I am specifically trying to accomplish is this:

1) display relevant/related Miva products within wordpress posts, and
2) display relevant/related WP posts within Miva product pages.

I want to create a cross-referral between products we sell using Miva and WP articles related to those products (and vice versa).

For instance, users reading one of our WP articles on global warming can see a list of relevant Miva products on global warming (and click to buy those products from within the WP post they're reading). Or, if people are browsing our global warming products in Miva, they can see links to relevant WP posts on the topic.

Can you help with this?

[kayakbabe]

Re: WordPress and Miva

I use wordpress for non shopping pages and for information like terms of agreement, policies, shipping info, return info etc.

basically you build a wordpress template that compliments your store gui.

You can use rss feeds from your wordpress to insert into your store, also vice versa there are word press plugins that can accept an rss feed.

With toolkit there are ways to grab external html files and pull them into the store.
So I supposed you could use a custom product field to insert a wordpress article url and then pull it into your store that way. If you ever went back and edited the article it would update.

Remember too, if you're using mysql as your store database. You can always connect directly into the store database and read from it. You could build a wordpress widget that could do that.

Everything you want is entirely possible with coding.

[skepticwebguy]

Re: WordPress and Miva

Remember too, if you're using mysql as your store database. You can always connect directly into the store database and read from it. You could build a wordpress widget that could do that.

yes. I use mysql for miva merchant. I can't build wordpress widgets/plugins unfortunately. but I wonder if one exists to pull from non-wordpress databases (assuming those databases are on the same server as the wordpress installation)? do you know of any? I'll look into it.

that would be cool!

[kayakbabe]

Re: WordPress and Miva

well. I'm confused about what your asking. My add/on kinda does that . It's not coded per se as wordpress widget. It's more of a 'plug-in'. I intentionally did not widgetize it. Becuase you really don't want to be entering your store database login info into a widget. The only place you want that info is in a protected config file. I suppose a widget could be written that required you manually modify your config file to put in extra db connection stuff. But I haven't ever seen it done (not to say it hasn't been done, i just haven't seen it). Probably becuase of the security issues. and widgets are normally for non super secure kinds of things.