StoreMorph Technology is a fancy marketing term for a template scripting language. But don’t let the words “scripting language” scare you – StoreMorph is for semi-technical store owners and programming guru’s alike! It lets you change the look and feel of your site and display store data within the HTML of your store!

The Miva Merchant 5 display system is made up of templates that freely mix HTML and StoreMorph. Using the template system, you can make your store look like anything you want within the bounds of your creative abilities!

Here are a few highlights of the StoreMorph template system:

• StoreMorph Items create variables that can be displayed in your pages using StoreMorph Entities and StoreMorph Lists.
• StoreMorph entities display simple variables
• StoreMorph Lists are lists of variables that can be displayed with loops
• The StoreMorph scripting language has a few control and looping structures you can use such as “foreach” to display many things in a a list (a product list for example) and “if/then/else” constructs for simple conditional displays.

The simplicity and elegance of StoreMorph is what makes Miva Merchant 5 one of the most powerful and customizable e-commerce platforms on the market today. We love StoreMorph so much, the basic syntax of the language is the basis for our name, . StoreMorph language constructs always begin with “mvt:”

Here are a few samples:

• &mvte:product:formatted_price; – Displays a products price
• <mvt:item name="buttons" param="AddToBasket" /> – Calls the “buttons” item to display a button on the page
• <mvt:item name="hdft" param="global_header" /> – Calls the “hdft” (header/footer) item to display the global header template

The coolest thing about StoreMorph is that any template can call items that display templates that have items in them that display more templates! So a full HTML page can be generated by re-using certain templates. For example, the Category Tree in your store is a template called from almost every page in your store. Therefore you only need to change the category tree template ONCE and those changes will be reflected on every page in your store!

StoreMorph is extremely powerful, and as such can also be a little intimidating. But start simple and browse our gallery of tips and tutorials, and in no time you’ll be saying <mvt:rocks /> !!!