The Viking Log » 2008

Our End of Summer Newsletter

:: The End of Summer Update ::

Greetings Viking friend! Our valuable try-annual newsletter has reached your retina with not a moment to spare. It’s been a busy summer for us–in between vacations, relocations and other life events, we have managed to develop a new batch of module goodness.

:: New Releases ::

Features

The new Features module brings our token expertise from our Merchant 4 template modules into the Merchant 5 arena. It allows you to generate templates that can be used throughout your store with much desired features such as best seller lists, random products, random products from lists, and more.

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=VC_FEATURES5

Flyout

Flyouts are a common feature these days and we have brought them to Merchant. As you may have experienced on sites like netflix, Flyout allows your customers to preview your products more closely without needing to click through to the individual product page. So a customer can, for example, take a look at the product description while still on the category page, then mouseover the next product and read that without needing to click through, click back, click through again, etc. Saving clicks while still promoting products effectively is highly recommended.

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=LC_FLYOUT5

Order Status Manager 5 Import / Export

This nifty extension module allows flat file imports of order statuses (stati?), and can trigger the sending of email notifications with the status update.

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=LC_OSM_IMPORTEXPORT5

Pulse

ELM Stats and ELM2 were very popular modules for every version of Merchant. Pulse is their Merchant 5 equivalent. Taking advantage of the superior mysql database, Pulse provides a great platform for advanced queries and logging.

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=VC_PULSE

Reveal

Another extension to one of our existing modules, Reveal is an add-on for Inventory Manager that uses AJAX (thus, no page reloads) to dynamically hide out of stock attributes.

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=LC_REVEAL5

USPS Address Validation 5.x

The United States Postal Service offers online address validation and this module ties in to that server in order to verify your customer’s address. Reduce missing or returned shipments and follow-up calls to your customers by getting a valid address as they place their order.

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=VC_USPS_ADDRESS5

Continue Shopping 5

This handy module provides a continue shopping button or link, allowing the customer to easily return to their last shopping page.

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=LC_CSHOP5

:: Coming Soon ::

Focus

Focus is our uber-search module for Miva Merchant 5. While Search Manager was a hugely popular module for Merchant 4, we are taking search to the next level. Focus, currently in beta on a large retail web site, offers the high-end functionality you’d expect to find on all leading ecommerce sites–weighted results, “sounds like”, price range searches and much more. More details to come. Sign up to our wait list to be informed when it is released:

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=VC_FOCUS

Vision

As many of you know, our Merchant 4 template modules were the backbone of any store that needed to look good and function well. With the release of 5.5, we saw that Miva Merchant had become stable–and powerful–and that we could now respond to the requests from our customers for advanced template options. Watch this space. And join the wait list to be notified when it is available:

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=VC_VISION5

Dispatch

Soft Goods 5 has been renamed as Dispatch. The forthcoming release addresses the issues many store owners had when selling digital goods–high hosting or bandwidth fees for large files, timeouts, etc. Join the wait list to be notified:

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=DISPATCH

:: Sale ::

With the release of these new modules, it’s only fitting that we offer you a discount on them. Some are already discounted as early releases, but you can still use the coupon code NEWVIKING for 15% off all currently available new modules.

http://vikingcoders.com/go.mv?ID=NEWMODS

The coupon is valid till the end of September. One per customer.

Thanks and Ves heill!

A new module release and, finally, a post from Brock!

It started out as a module for Merchant 5.x to display randomly selected products on the storefront page but it turned into quite bit more than that.

The new Features (yes, that’s the name) module provides additional Features for your Merchant 5.x store. With the placement of the module’s item tokens you can display, anywhere in your store, products randomly selected from your store, products randomly selected from particular categories, your store’s best sellers, and more! The module accomplishes this by tying particular tokens to templates configured from within the module’s admin. You can specify the exact layout of the template and display it anywhere in your store with a single item token. Particular details about the items are configured with separate tokens in the templates (for example, you can separately arrange where to display a product’s thumbnail and name).

The module comes with the follow templates but you can add as many as you want:

Random Products
Random Products from Category
Best Sellers
Images from List
Random Images from List
Products from List
Random Products from List

You can find the details on what each of these templates does in the module’s documentation here and you’ll find it in our store here.

Those among you familiar with our Storefront Template module will recognize some of the functionality in the new module as it uses the same sorts of tokens (many are identical) and functionality. But instead of focusing only on the storefront page this module will let you display the templates just about anywhere.

The module went through the development process pretty quickly but has a few major features, such as the ability to preview templates in your store before making them live, that will be showing up very soon in a number of other new modules.

Speaking of new modules, the Focus module (it’s been a long time but I vaguely recall having posted here about it before), our uber-search module for Merchant has undergone a re-working to provide for the hosting of the search indexes on our own server rather than locally on the store’s servers. This has greatly improved the installation process and has moved us quite close to a final release. Don’t hold me to it but I’m hoping to have it in the store within the next two weeks.

-Brock

As an interesting aside, when we formed VikingCoders we each searched around for monikers from Norse mythology to “add to the mystique” so to speak. I stumbled upon “Brok”, one of two dwarves that worked together to create Thor’s hammer. Seemed like quite a remarkable coincidence so it stuck….perhaps too well. It wasn’t long before I was the only one with a “Norse moniker” and “Brok” is close enough to “Brock” the line is often blurred as to which is correct.

Our End of Summer Newsletter

A new module release and, finally, a post from Brock!

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