Starting with Miva Merchant 9.6 and later, you're able to set up template-based feeds for your Miva Merchant store. The template based feeds are designed to give you maximum flexibility over their output, which allows you to use your generated feeds for a number of different possible needs. Once a fee to set up you are able to run the feed from a number of different ways. You can manually run them from inside the Miva Merchant Store Admin, you can set up a scheduled task so they are run automatically, or you can have them run when a specified URL is hit. Additionally, a feed can be outputted in multiple formats. It can be written to a file on your server, emailed to an email address, or outputted into the web accessible via a unique URL. To get to the feeds functionality, log into your Store Admin and click into “Marketing” and then click into the Feeds tab.
Let's create a new feed by clicking on this “New Feed” button. The Add Feed modal will pop up. Notice that there are two types of feeds you can configure under the Feed module field; a site map, or a template-based feed. We’ll take a look at site maps in another video. For now we're setting up a template based feed, so we'll selected that. We’ll give this feed a code and a name. If you want the feed accessible from the web, check mark “Enable URI Access.” This is helpful if you're using the feed with a third-party automation solution, or if you want to view the feed via a web browser window. You also have the option of securing the URI with a URI Access Key, so that anyone who stumbles upon this page wouldn't necessarily be able to run and view the Feed Output without knowing the access key.
If you want the feed to be outputted to a file on your server, make sure that this is checked. The generated file can either live in your Data or Script Directory. The Data Directory is private and can't be accessed from the outside, so if you're trying to prep this file to be accessible by third-party solutions, you may want to choose the script folder, which is essentially your Web Root folder. In the file path field you can give your final a name such as “/store-products.csv.” This will write the file to the web root folder on your server.
Moving on, if you want the feed output emailed to an email address, check mark this option and make sure you have the email from, the email to, and the email subject fields filled out. The feed output can be added to the email in line, or it can be added as a file attachment to your email.
Lastly, you need to choose what type of feed your setting up. You can output Product Data, Category Data or Customer Data. We’re working with products, so we’ll select the Product Template and then click on the “Add” button. Now we have a product feed created. We can configure a URI for it by selecting the feed and then clicking on the URI’s button. We’ll add a URI and call it /product-feed. Now when we browse to Domain/product-feed, we can see the feed outputted to the screen. Great, so now how do we control what we want to output with this feed. For that we want to customize the Feeds Template Code, which we’ll cover in the next video.
If you want further reading on our Template-based Feeds, go to our docs here.