URI Management
Miva Merchant URLs - A Brief History
As far as Miva Merchant and this document are concerned, an URL is the address that you enter in a browser to visit a web page. There is an ongoing debate as to whether you should call these addresses URLs (Universal Resource Locator) or URIs (Universal Resource Indicator), but for this product and reference guide, URL and URI both refer to the same thing: the web addresses that let your customers find your on-line store and store pages.
If you have some time and some coffee, please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL
PR7
In older releases of Miva Merchant, PR7 and before, your Miva Merchant store had to use "long" URLs. For example, to reach a product page in your store, a customer would have entered something like this:
These URLs were what search engines like Google indexed, and what your customers saw as they navigated through your store. Version 9 still supports long URLs.
See: 
> URI Management > Settings tab > Runtime section > Link Source list box.
PR8
In PR8 Miva Merchant introduced "short links". In the background, Miva Merchant would (and still does) create the long URLs, but you could show search engines and customers a product page URL that looked like this:
http://HSeldon.mivamerchantdev.com/product/hawaiian_shirt.html
Short links had a few advantages:
- They were a little easier to read, and manually type in, if you had to
- You could use the admin interface to customize them a little. For example, you didn't have to use the word "product" in your product page URLs. You could change "product" to anything that you wanted.
PR8 style short links are still supported in Version 9, only now they are called Legacy SEO Settings.
See: > URI Management > Settings tab > Runtime section > Link Source list box.
See: > URI Management > Legacy SEO Settings tab.
Version 9
In Version 9, you'll see the term "URI Management", which refers to two different things.
- URI Management is a heading in the button that has a number of tabs.
- URI Management also refers to a new and completely different style of URL. The main difference is that the Version 9 URI Management URLs are a kind of "URL alias". You can make your Version 9 URLs look like almost anything that you want.