Items#
Items are the building blocks of Miva Merchant and can also be one of the hardest concepts in Miva Merchant to grasp, however they are extremely important to how Miva Pages function. An Item is a user interface component that provides specific functionality to a Page template.
A default installation of Miva Merchant has more than 75 included items. Some examples of commonly used items would be the nav bar, the category tree, and the head tag. Think of them as includes that can contain functions, HTML, and variables. For example, if you see the Breadcrumbs Item called on the page, all it is really doing is retrieving the content from that tab and printing it on the page. To use an Item on a page template you must first assign the item to the page in Items tab, By selecting the assigned toggle.
At the end of the day an item is just a reference to a Miva Component Module. A Component Module is a compiled Miva Script file that follows Miva API. For more information take a look at Miva’s API documentation using the link in the additional references section. The real power of Items comes from the ability for 3rd party module developers to create new items that extend Miva’s core functionality. This allows developers to leverage the power of the Miva Script programming language and create almost any functionality imaginable on a very flexible and highly secure framework.
Item Assignment#
If an item is assigned to a page, a lot of times that item will have a tab or template you can access. For example the content item that comes default with every install of Miva creates a new template within the page to easily drop text without having to edit the main details section.
A Tab or Section would not appear for two reasons. First, the item may be assigned to give you access to certain variables on that page. An example of this would be the store item. When assigned to a page there is no new tab or section that shows up. Instead, it gives you access to global store variables that allow you to print data like the Store Name, Store address and other information that can be found in the Store Details section of the Miva admin.
The other reason why a tab would not appear is because the Item is a Global Template Item and any changes you make to the template will affect all Pages that use that Item. Some common examples of these global item templates can be found in the Settings tab within the User Interface section.
Syntax#
Once the item has been assigned you then call in the item through the item tag on the page template.
Item Tags can have 3 forms:
Self closing Item with no parameter:
<mvt:item name="html_profile" />
Self closing Item with parameter:
<mvt:item name="head" param="css_list" />
Item with opening and closing tags:
<mvt:item name="body"></mvt:item>