I am currently working on a new CSSUI Ready Theme development store and importing data from a legacy Miva site. There are many bells and whistles to Miva 9 that I have ignored for years that I am excited to implement. One of them is the use of Custom Fields and Alternate Pages.
Our current website utilizes a legacy setup of the Sebenza Custom Product and Category Pages. Obviously I need to get away from that. However, I have some questions on how best to add information to new new store.
Some questions:
1. We have a furniture store that specializes in higher-end manufacturers and Designers. Customers want to read about designers, and manufacturing methods, etc. With Sebenza, I created multiple custom product pages that had Vendor/Designer information that I could just assign to a product group. I understand that I have the option with the "new" Miva options to simply create Alternate pages, but I think I would end up creating dozens of them again: one for each specialty vendor. Am I not seeing how to best implement Alternate pages for my desired vendor-based product pages? I think the Alternate pages is not really meant for this? I really wanted to get away from maintaining dozens of separate pages.
2. Because Alternate pages does not seem like a good solution, I assume that using Custom Fields is the way to go. So I created a custom Vendor Field text area as my first test of custom fields. It shows up fine and populates the desired product pages just fine. The only problem is that I need to enter that information at the individual product page level and that seems tedious. So, I am thinking there is a better way?
3. Is the best way is to add a new column to the exported flat file from the "older" site? Copy and paste the Vendor information into the corresponding cell for each and every product that falls within that product family and then import the new information to the new site? If this is the best option, how do I make sure it ends up in the vendor custom field? I can't think what I would add to the .csv file to make sure the vendor custom field is populated at the individual product leve. Also, doesn't this abundance of replicated text bloat the file?
4. Am I missing a way of creating a custom field, that already has the data entered, that I can then apply to a specific product family? This seems like the easiest option but not sure that it exists.
Although I am not new to Miva, I am very new to Miva 9 features and fairly basic in implementing Miva Code. Please supply details. I can usually understand what is going on, I am just not good at creating from scratch.
Thank you for any suggestions about how best to implement using custom fields.
Our current website utilizes a legacy setup of the Sebenza Custom Product and Category Pages. Obviously I need to get away from that. However, I have some questions on how best to add information to new new store.
Some questions:
1. We have a furniture store that specializes in higher-end manufacturers and Designers. Customers want to read about designers, and manufacturing methods, etc. With Sebenza, I created multiple custom product pages that had Vendor/Designer information that I could just assign to a product group. I understand that I have the option with the "new" Miva options to simply create Alternate pages, but I think I would end up creating dozens of them again: one for each specialty vendor. Am I not seeing how to best implement Alternate pages for my desired vendor-based product pages? I think the Alternate pages is not really meant for this? I really wanted to get away from maintaining dozens of separate pages.
2. Because Alternate pages does not seem like a good solution, I assume that using Custom Fields is the way to go. So I created a custom Vendor Field text area as my first test of custom fields. It shows up fine and populates the desired product pages just fine. The only problem is that I need to enter that information at the individual product page level and that seems tedious. So, I am thinking there is a better way?
3. Is the best way is to add a new column to the exported flat file from the "older" site? Copy and paste the Vendor information into the corresponding cell for each and every product that falls within that product family and then import the new information to the new site? If this is the best option, how do I make sure it ends up in the vendor custom field? I can't think what I would add to the .csv file to make sure the vendor custom field is populated at the individual product leve. Also, doesn't this abundance of replicated text bloat the file?
4. Am I missing a way of creating a custom field, that already has the data entered, that I can then apply to a specific product family? This seems like the easiest option but not sure that it exists.
Although I am not new to Miva, I am very new to Miva 9 features and fairly basic in implementing Miva Code. Please supply details. I can usually understand what is going on, I am just not good at creating from scratch.
Thank you for any suggestions about how best to implement using custom fields.
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