As we’ve just seen, pages are a core building block of Miva Merchant. They control the entire look and feel. Pages, along with items are what give you the functionality on each page template. One of the best parts of Miva Merchant is everything is customizable. The entire checkout process, the product page, the category page, the storefront, anything that you see on the website can be controlled via a page. This flexibility and openness is what makes Miva Merchant such a powerful developer platform.
Now, there’s one other concept I want to introduce you to called Pseudo Pages or “Fake” pages. There’s four pseudo pages in Miva Merchant, so there’s not that many. However, there’s one main one that you’ll use quite a bit on a day to day basis so it’s very important to understand what it’s doing and how it works. One of the big confusing parts about a pseudo page is it doesn’t exist in the Admin. There’s no way to edit it or make changes to it and there’s a reason for that. A pseudo page only has logic that says, “direct the user to this page or direct the user to this page depending on some condition. Normally that condition would be if they were logged in or not, but there could be other conditions. Like I said, there’s only four pseudo pages, but the main one, OINF is the one pseudo page you work with the most.
OINF is the checkout page. OINF is the page that initiates checkout. Anytime someone checks that checkout link either in the basket page or in the global header, it’s going to take them to the OINF. Now, OINF isn’t a real page that exists in the Admin, which we’ll see here in a second. It does have logic to take the customer to the login page or first step of checkout. Let’s jump back to Miva and see this in action.
Here I am on the basket page. I have a test product in my cart and there’s a checkout link here and there’s a checkout link here. Both go to the same place. So I’m going to click this link and pay special attention to the url up here. So Screen=OINF. Screen refers to the page that’s being displayed. So we’re on the OINF screen. Say I wanted to edit the OINF page to add something to this. I’m going to come back to the Miva Admin and here I’m going to go to menu, and then User Interface, and Pages, which will give me a list of all of the pages in the store. I can either scroll down and look for OINF or I can use the search tool. We’ll see that there’s nothing returned. OINF doesn’t exists as a page. I can’t actually edit it. Then we jump back to the front end here. Let’s do that same thing, but I’m going to sign in first. Ok, so now that I’m logged in I’m going to go back to the basket page and I’m going to click the checkout link. So you see, here while we still went to the screen of OINF. However, instead of going to that login page, we went to the first step in checkout. Which this screen is the customer bill to / ship to page or OCST. So what happened there? Well, this OINF, this pseudo page has built in logic that says if you’re not logged in take you to the order log in page which is ORDL, or if you are logged in, bypass that page and take you straight to the first step in checkout which is OCST. That’s exactly what this pseudo page does. So this is just a key thing to remember. Anytime you see OINF, which is the correct page to initiate checkout, you’re never actually on the OINF page. It’s either going to be OCST or ORDL.
There’s one more feature of the OINF I want to show you. Back in the Miva Merchant Admin, under User Interface Settings here, and under the Settings tab, if I scroll down There’s a section here for Shopping Interface Settings. Now, here it is here and all it has is a single checkbox that says Display Customer Login Before Checkout. This is another feature of OINF. If this is checked and you’re not logged in it will always display the order login screen as the first screen in checkout. If this is not checked it will never display the order login screen and it will bypass it all together. Let’s take a look. So right now I have it checked. So I’m going to come back to my store and I’m not logged in here I’m going to hit checkout and it takes me to ORDL which is the order login screen. Now I’m going to hit back. Let’s go and uncheck Display Customer Login Before Checkout. Now when I click the same checkout link, it skipped that screen altogether. It takes me straight to OCST. So while not a major change, you do have Admin control over whether that login screen displays or not. This is just another feature of the OINF Pseudo page.
So earlier I said there are four pseudo pages. Here in the Pages Reference Guide we list all the four pseudo pages and what they do. A link to this reference guide can be found underneath this video. You can see there’s one for ACNT, which is for Customer Account, AFAE for Affiliate Account, OINF which is the one we just went over and then OUSL which is for upsell which decides whether to show a single upsell or a multiple upsell page. So these are the four pages. It’s good to know they exist, but the one you’re going to use most often is OINF. Understanding what a pseudo page is and how it works will save you hours of headache on a page that you can’t actually edit via the Admin.