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!

p.s. Here are some of the forthcoming additions to Pulse:

- hide User Agents from general reports (so they don’t take up as much space). This will be optional though as many people get a buzz when the search bots show up

- truncate/wrap long referer* urls (need this in order to prevent long urls from bleeding)

- add pagination to long reports

These have already been partially implemented so we hope to have them available in the next update.

* Did you know that “Referer is a common misspelling of the word referrer. It is so common, in fact, that it made it into the official specification of HTTP – the communication protocol of the World Wide Web – and has therefore become the standard industry spelling when discussing HTTP referers.”?

Thanks Wikipedia.

Update 03/05/08: we’re back from the Miva Merchant conference and working on Pulse. Today we have added a product name field with sorting to the Product Stats, fixed a bug that arises when you are blocking IP addresses, and changed to Order Stats referer so that it picks up the initial referer–the site the visitor came from rather than the page that lead them to the checkout. (In hindsight, it’s obvious that’s what it should have been doing but these things sometimes get overlooked when you’re knee deep in the code!) There isn’t an update as yet as we also want to include a handful of other tweaks and fixes.

Here are some screenshots so you know that it really does exist:

Last year we attended the Rails Conference.  One of the speakers asked the crowd, a room of  maybe 1000 people, how many had blogs.  Very nearly 1/2 the crowd raised their hand.   I personally doubt that 500 people in that room really had something to say worth reading.  And I suspect the same can be said for most of what I  would really like to say (which is probably where all those other bloggers go wrong).  That said, I’m going to try to focus on what you might be interested in reading, mainly information on our modules and development (current and future).  Also feel free to make suggestions on subjects you’d like to hear me ramble on about.   At least that way I’m guaranteed at least one interested reader.

First up will likely be a discussion on the upgrade of Affiliate Manager to 5.x.

Michael Brock
a VikingCoder

We will have the documentation available for this next week (August 6 +)