Desperate for help customizing Miva shopping cart site!!

Thank you for your response.  I did manage to finally get a lead on my answer and I did finally find designextend.com.  Had I not found them, you would have done me the best favor by pointing the way to them.

I finally called tech support at Miva and just about turned one of their help desk techs upside down until she spilled an answer to my question.

On the simplistic level, I really wanted to know if I could hyperlink my current html pages to the shopping cart files. Why everyone thought I wanted to rewrite the Miva script I still can't understand, except that they deal with higher tech questions than mine all day long and could not seem to drop down to the level of my question.

The simple answer that I wanted is that yes, I can keep my current site and create hyperlinks from my images or pages to the appropriate file produced by the Miva wizard. That was what I wanted to know as I was fearful that I could somehow disable the shopping cart if I tried that and it failed.

I downloaded everything I could and tore apart other Miva customer sites trying to figure it out for myself. I finally did locate designextend.com and found that they have a forum. They also sell a manual, which I purchased. I am very disappointed in the manual as it has been written in a force-justified format with large gaps of white space between the words so it is very hard to read. I wrote asking if they could provide me with the same manual formatted without the justification and, of course, the author was insulted.  I think I will have to copy, paste, and refomat all 208 pages and hope that it is more helpful than the one on Miva's site. The pdf file on Miva's site is free. The one I downloaded form  Designextend was $29.00.

Thanks for the lead. I thought I would pass along what I learned for you or anyone else who may want to benefit from my experience.  I have yet to see the software as my host has not installed it, yet, but I hope to have some idea of what I am going to be doing before I get there and am on the client's clock.

Judi : )

KB:

Thanks again for your support and for thinking of others.

Yes, the pdf file at the docs location you mention gives a step-by-step on how to set up the shopping cart. Unfortunately, it does not address how to integrate it with current html pages.

I really appreciate your comments on their interface. Since my host has not yet installed the software, I still can't take a look at it. Thanks to you, I am now prepared.  I have written very complex applications in Access so I have some concept of what the input forms are for, how they dump data into the fields in the tables, and how they "report" to the page files which are the report forms.  Without that knowledge, I guess I would really be in the dark.

If anyone else is reading these, what helped me the most was looking at the Galleria on miva.com and taking the pages apart to see how they are linked to other files.

Now I am going to start plugging away.

You are terrific to help!

Judi : )

If you appreciated his/her help, you should consider awarding him/her the points for the question.

Comment accepted as answer

Dain:

Thank you for helping me find out how I do that. I had not noticed the buttons under the individual answers. The last time I awarded points, it came up as an option where I would post another comment and I selected it from there. I was waiting for the option to come up again and thought that maybe the forum allows a thread to go on for a certain amount of time and then asks for the points.

Thank you for pointing out to me that my suppostion was faulty. I searched the page more carefully and noted that one can accept and award points for answers at any time.

I have not used this forum for some time as a person I trusted upgraded my computers and messed them up enough to have had them for a year and I had to take him to court to finally get them back. Of course, he had reformatted my hard drives and I lost all my e-mail and bookmarks. Had EE not sent me some e-mail, I never would have found them again.

Thank you for the education.

Judi