Before you get started building modules for Miva Merchant, you first need to set up your dev environment. There are two main pieces to this. The first one is to get a free developer store that we offer and the second one is to download and install the compiler. In this video we’re going to talk about how to get your free Developer Store. There’s a link to sign up for a free Developers Store at the top of this page. You can also get there by going to www.mivamerchant.com/videos and clicking on Developers. This will take you to our Developer Stores registration page. Put in all of your information and create a password. These Developer Stores are full functioning Miva Merchant installs. The only limitation has to do with the amount of disk space that they come with and they can never be pushed live. They are intended solely for Developer use and they are the best place to build and test modules. We’ll give you as many Miva Merchant Developer Stores as you need. However, they are limited to one per email address.
Once you fill out all your information, it creates your Developer Store. It only takes a few seconds and you should get an email immediately with your new login credentials with your for your new Developer Store. While the account information is provided automatically, but we do review and approve every Developer Store request. Sometimes this process can take 24-48 hours, so please be patient. However, during normal business hours, you should get your email and your Miva Merchant Store within a couple hours.
The email you get will look like this. You will have a pre-generated URL that starts with dts and then a four-digit number and then mivamerchant.com followed by the path to the Miva Merchant Storefront and the path to the Miva Merchant Admin. This will also include your Miva Merchant Username, your email address, and the password is going to be the password you created during the setup process. You also have ftp access on these stores. There’s ftp host and your username. While it looks long, it has two @ signs, this is the correct username. It will be your email addres@(mivadeveloperstoreurl) and the ftp password is going to be the same password you used during the signup process. Once your developer store has been created, you should be able to click this link and go straight to the Miva Merchant Admin.
One other thing I want to show you regarding these Developer Accounts, is that you have full access to a control panel. To get to your control panel, simply go to https://cp.mivamerchant.com and then type in your username which is going to be your email address and the password as the ftp Miva login.
The Control Panel will give you access to manage your web site, but the main thing you’ll access this for is the database. Click on Scripts and Databases. Once you click on mySQL Databases, you’ll see that I already have a database created for me, as well as a database user, which automatically got created when Miva Merchant was installed. You can get to the php Miva Admin which is a popular web interface to see the Database by clicking on this “Manage” link here. Before I do that I need to take note of my user name. The database user name is automatically generated for you, but it’s different than all the other usernames we’ve used up to this point. So we need to copy this here, click on manage, which will open up a brand new window, and this url can be bookmarked if you want to bypass logging into the control panel first. This is a quick way to easily get to the php admin. So I’m going to paste in my user name here, and then the password is going to be the exact same password for both ftp and Miva Admin. Once I’ve clicked login, I now have access to see the entire Miva Merchant Database. It’s extremely helpful when trying to debug module related issues and make sure database functions are working correctly.