[mv] few Newbie questions, please answer

[Oldarnie <ecommerce@a-dream.com.au>]

******    message to minivend-users from Oldarnie <ecommerce@a-dream.com.au>     ******

Hi,

I have finally got MiniVend4 running with MySQL as the database and it
looks great, MiniMate is also installed but I am unsure how to access
it.

The questions are as follows:

Is there a way of creating a URL so that someone can go straight to a
product page (using on the fly pages) and if so could someone point me
to any docs or if not, give me some clues please?

I liked the layout of the demo used in version 3.x and wondered how I
could aquire the demo only, and drop it into ver 4, if that'a possible?

If I can't do that without a lot of recoding etc, could someone tell me
the basic operation of the simple demo in ver 4, so I can redesign the
layout. To make answering this a little easier here is what I think
happens:

When entering the URL/simple the index.html page under the web tree is
displayed as a splash page and requires the person to click on 'enter'
to get to the real site controlled by minivend and the cgi script loads
the main page from the 'pages' directory located in
/home/catalogs/simple.
After looking at that page for some time it does not seem to have any
page formating (that is if I have got the right page) however it still
drops a background colour that I set in the splash page, so I assume
that the page formatting is not carried over from the splash page.
By page formatting I am talking about page attributes and not html
tables etc, for eg. background colour/image text colour, link colour
etc.
What I don't understand is why the images are stored in the site web
tree, and not in the catalogs directory or in the database as blob
fields etc?

Lastly version 4 seems to have dropped the banner facility in the
layout, is that because it's more difficult in ver 4 to have random
banner display?

I am looking forward to building a catalog site with ver 4 and it's
certainly easier to understand than it's earlier version, also having it
work without much trouble with MySQL is great, I just need to understand
the flow of the program a little more from the browser point of view

Thanks in advance and I will be gratefull to anyone who can help me
understand the above, especially the first question. Other catalogs that
I have seen, seem to allow immediate access to a products page by the
use of a URL such as:

http://www.site.com/simple/cgi-bin/page?candle-holder

so I am hoping minivend can do something similar
Again thanks
Oldarnie

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