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skiingman
Joined: Dec 08, 2004
# Posts: 15
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Posted: 2005-Apr-02 22:48
I am developing a brochure/ecommerce site for my employer. The number of ecommerce products, in total, will be quite small. Less than 500 quite likely.
The most important feature of the site is that it must provide better than average content. The products are high end and low volume, and we need the content to be very good and unique. Many of the products won't be available for online sale, due to shipping and other concerns. Unfortunately, it seems that most of the ecommerce/CMS systems available don't lend themselves well to brochure type information.
I have access to Miva Merchant, and of course osCommerce. In my eyes, I think I'd be better off using Miva, as I'm more or less clueless.
I want to develop a fairly comprehensive three column CSS derived navigation system, but this is not apparently easy or cheap to do with Miva. You can turn off headers, footers, and navigation with Miva and build your own static navigation system. As I don't plan on having more than ten or twelve categories, I think this would be manageable.
I've found that I can nest a Miva dynamically generated page in a HTML document using the OBJECT element. Playing around with this a bit, it seemed to work fairly well.
Is this kind of setup a bad idea? Does anyone have a less roundabout or prettier solution available? I'm fairly concerned about what happens to SE results of such a setup as well.
Thank you in advance,
Garrett
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lizardz
Joined: Nov 12, 2004
# Posts: 1394
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Posted: 2005-Apr-03 10:33
I can nest a Miva dynamically generated page in a HTML document using the OBJECT element.
Does that work in Opera, Firefox, or Safari? My guess is no.
I don't know what Miva urls look like, but my impression is that miva isn't very flexible, I'm doing a shopping cart site right now using OsCommerce, but our shopping items are all hard coded into the HTML, we don't use the oscommerce add item stuff at all except for the database purchasing side of things. Oscommerce is a pretty unpleasant product to work with, it's a mess, but it does work fine. But it's also a bit of overkill for what you need.
Remember, it's easier to overbuild your system now than it is go back later and rebuild it because what you first made isn't adequate to your future needs.
[ Message was edited by: bhartzer 04/04/2005 01:43 pm ... Reason: formatted quote ]
[ Message was edited by: bhartzer 04/04/2005 01:43 pm ]
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skiingman
Joined: Dec 08, 2004
# Posts: 15
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Posted: 2005-Apr-04 04:42
Yeah, that last sentence really hits home.
The <OBJECT> works in Firefox, so I assume blindly that it would work in other Mozilla code based stuff like Safari. I believe it is solid HTML 4.01 code, but I could be wrong.
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lizardz
Joined: Nov 12, 2004
# Posts: 1394
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Posted: 2005-Apr-04 21:40
The <OBJECT> works in Firefox, so I assume blindly that it would work in other Mozilla code based stuff like Safari."
Don't guess, test. Try itin Opera 7-8, if you don't have access to a mac running safari, download a linux kde based cd bootable distro like mepis or kanotix, boot into the live cd, access your site code via konqueror, which uses the khtml code base that safari uses, and test it in that.
Safari does not use the gecko rendering engine, it uses the khtml rendering engine, completely different animal. Even though safari is a small percent of the market, it's an affluent market segment, and well worth supporting as far as I'm concerned.
I looked at miva stuff a few years ago, but honestly can't remember anything about it. But I do know how hard it is to go back and set everything up again, I'd rather do this stuff right the first time. Again, oscommerce is not done very well IMO, but it does the job ok, it's just not fun to work with if you want to really tweak stuff.
Even if it's overkill, if you use it, you'll have tons of features and addons and modules available to you for future change and expansion, and it will all be under your control.
Another person I consulted with had paid too much money to have a site built, but it was done all with proprietary cms/shopping cart stuff that only ran off the site builder's servers, so they paid to own nothing, and in fact decided just to dump the whole thing rather than keep hemoragging the exhorbitant monthly fees the design company was charging them. Full total loss, in other words.
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skiingman
Joined: Dec 08, 2004
# Posts: 15
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Posted: 2005-Apr-06 05:55
Thank you very much for the sage advice.
The boss decided to tackle this ourselves when he realized we would be spending somewhere in the vicinity of 1500 dollars a month to not own our software, have a mediocre product, etc.
I like very much what you are saying about osCommerce, I'm going to get a test install going so I can see just how far over my head I'll be getting. 
Thank you for the advice re: Safari. I didn't know that, and that's a very important demographic for us. I actually do have a copy of Konqueror on a live CD.
Looking deeper into the Miva stuff in the past few days, I've realized the absolute minimum I would have to spend on modules for a reasonable implementation would be five hundred bucks. I'd much rather spend that money in time instead, learning something like osCommerce.
Thank you again.
-Garrett
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lizardz
Joined: Nov 12, 2004
# Posts: 1394
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Posted: 2005-Apr-06 20:45
"I've realized the absolute minimum I would have to spend on modules for a reasonable implementation would be five hundred bucks. I'd much rather spend that money in time instead, learning something like osCommerce."
That was my impression with miva, and most other products like that, it's just not a very good deal.
I'm about halfway through the oscommerce thing, maybe less, and most of the difficulties I'm having [repairing a mutilated and currently active system] are not issues I think you'd run across doing a clean install, which I wish I could do, but can't.
Time spent learning this is, although very frustrating, time that your organizatin will own, not rent or lease, and the end result is a system that will do what you want do, more or less.
On the downside, compared to other open source projects I've used, I give OS Commerce a C- in terms of coding and architecture. This is unfortunate, those guys should redo it from the ground up, and they should study phpbb's programming and page building philosophy long enough to understand why their decisions totally sucked, and why phpbb's didn't.
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