[ic] Deciding between Interchange and Miva (Questions)

[Joshua Lavin]

Hey JP,

I too deliberated between IC and Miva. A friend of mine uses Miva
exclusively for his clients. In talking with him, it seems to me the Miva is
somewhat limited -- for example, for him to make a page with no products,
like an "about us" page, it's pretty weird. In IC, it's a cinch. I also
noticed that he has no search box on his sites, but you have to click a link
to the search page. Maybe this is just the way he does it, though.

All of my experience with IC is for one site: www.shopalert.us. I knew a
little about Perl, but nothing about databases. After much learning, I now
have IC integrated with a Microsoft SQL-based POS system, so they exchange
data back and forth. I don't know that Miva can do that.

IMHO, Miva is for those who don't want to learn much, but just get a site up
quickly. While you have to hack at it more, IC can take you much farther
than Miva. There's no reason why IC (with many modifications) couldn't power
Amazon.com. (Right, Mike?)

> 6. I didn't see anything in the demo for importing
> products.  Is there a facility to do this and can it
> handle both full imports (for updating everything on
> the site) and incremental imports (for just adding new
> products)?  And is it as simple as creating a text
> file, uploading and running an import program?

We do complete replacements of the products table every night through a text
file import. The POS system uploads its table to the web server, the web
server moves it to the IC directory as "products.txt" and removes the
"products.sql." Then the server restarts, which loads in the new
products.txt. (I had to make them look alike.) It'd be nice to use an ODBC
connection, but I'm still new to this, and this works anyways.

Best wishes!

Josh