The sorter module gives you the ability to sort your Miva Merchant categories and
products very quickly from an easy to use, admin interface. The typical sort time for
700+ products is 1-2 seconds. In the latest version of the module, you can also
capture the number of products in each category for quick lookup at runtime for
use in the category tree or other Merchant pages. This module is for MIVA Merchant 5.x. We also have the corresponding module for an older version of Merchant.
Features:
- Sort categories by name, code or entry date
- Sort products by name, code, price or entry date (ascending or descending)
- Sort entire store or sort one category at a time
- Sort products within categories by name, code, price or entry date (ascending or descending)
- Categories do not all have to be sorted the same way
- Move specific products to the top of the product list, search and category pages with
a quick mass input
- Display an image before the product name for products with a sort order number lower than the trigger number established by the store owner
- Count products in each category for later display at runtime to reduce server load and page view time
Feature Details.
You can sort the categories and subcategories by name, code, or entry date. Many
stores find that their categories are best sorted by category code rather than
category name. This way they can create codes which will put their categories
in the order they want. While most may actually coincide with category names
being alphabetical, stores can rearrange the categories to put things like "Specials"
or "Close Out" at the top of bottom of the list. The customer does not see the
category code, they only see the results of the sorted list.
The products can be sorted by name, code, price, or entry date. The
product sorting can be done either as either ascending or descending. Most
stores will sort the products by name. The very quick sort is done storewide
with a couple button clicks. The storewide sort results in the products being
sorted in all of the category screens, the product list screen, and the
search screen.
You can sort the
products within individual categories differently than the sorting in the store at
large. So while the product list and most categories might be sorted alphabetically,
you could have others sorted by price as ascending or descending. You can sort the
products by a specific category and then on the next screen, make minor changes to
re-arranged that sorting. This gives you the ability to move certain products to the
top for more customer visibility.
You can also move to the top of the list up to 999 product codes in the order
you want them. They can appear before any other products on the product list,
search and each category screen. This ability to assign a sort order number also
makes it possible to flag products with images, e.g. new or hot, to all products with a sort
order number less than the trigger you assign using a token.
You can also
elect to count the products in each category. If you do, the counts will
be available at runtime in Merchant. By having the data in a quick lookup table,
Merchant does not have to count the products in each category as it displays the
category list in a 3rd party module's category tree. It simply shows the previously stored totals. This
option cannot be used in stores which use availability groups to hide products from
some customers because the totals would show the amounts for all products in each
category. The sorter module uses a token to display the products-in-category total after the category name if you are using a 3rd party
category tree template module.
The module currently fully supports the mivasql configuration of MIVA Merchant 5. It also supports MySQL as long as load balancing has the data stored on the single MySQL server and
permissions are set correctly on the data
directories. This would be the case in most of the server setups. If you are using Merchant 5.x and your host is web.com, you will not be able to use this module due to the way they configure their servers. There are no known issues with
other hosts.
