Affiliate Press for WordPress

The easiest way to set up an affiliate website

Affiliate Press is a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to set up an affiliate website based on product feeds as easy as 1-2-3. It allows you to set up an unlimited amount of affiliate product feeds for processing. You can easily tie a product – created as a custom post type – to an item in a product feed based on a shared identifier – a custom field. Once a feed has been processed the products will – thanks to a little PHP snippet – display a list of websites and the prices it’s available for on those websites, linked by affiliate links. Easy as that. All that remains is creating a nice theme, optimizing your website with your favorite SEO plugin ( I suggest using Yoast’s WordPress SEO ) and maybe setting up an SEA plan to draw some more traffic to your website.

How the plugin came to be

Not too long ago I started building a tool that would allow companies to easily compare their prices compared to those of their competitors based on their affiliate product feeds. Having made this application in CakePHP I couldn’t help but wonder how many of the functionality I had built was actually already present in WordPress. Instead of focusing on the corporate side of things and inspired by some friends who run a bunch of affiliate websites I decided to make it a bit easier for the masses.

What’s still to come

Currently the plugin is still released as a beta version because I’m still tweaking a lot of the functionality and want to make it even easier to use. So what’s still on the drawing board? Well, at least the following:

• A settings page.
  
• Cron job support for processing affiliate feeds
• Nifty little dashboard giving you some insight on how your affiliate website is performing.
• Add a feed-wizard
• An extensive help and documentation section
• Whatever you guys come up with, as long as it makes sense, so feel free to let me know

Changelog

0.3.8

• Added ways to contact me to the sidebar.
• Expanded the FAQ.

0.3.7

• Added support for categories and tags to the product post type.
• Updated the FAQ.

0.3.6

• Added contextual help to all the pages of the plugin. I’ll try to expand these in the near future.
• Removed a dependency on the $_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’] variable.
• Confirmed that the wizard works perfectly with TradeDoubler product feeds.

0.3.5

• Confirmed that the wizard also works with tradetracker.net product feeds.
• Made some changes to the way how the dashboard statistics are calculated.
• Added the currency to the price table for the front-end.
• Fixed some typos.

0.3.4

• Added a first version of the dashboard.

0.3.3

• Added the ‘Add New Feed Wizard’. It’s still rudimentary and feedback would be highly appreciated. Should work like a charm with Daisycon feeds.

0.3.2

• Minor CSS change.
• Alerts/Messages are now dismissible.

0.3.1

• Added support for cron jobs. They will process all prices every hour for now. Later I’ll make this manageable through a settings page.
• Fixed a small bug where performing a bulk actions redirected you to the wrong page.
• Tweaked the styling on the messages/warnings a little.
• Made the icons stand out more.
• The title tags for the ‘hidden pages’ are now also rendered correctly.
• Switched from POST to GET methods on the feed and item index pages to allow keyboard entry of page numbers for the pagination.
• Added support to return you to the right index page if you’ve been using sortable columns.

0.3

• Rewrite of a substantial part of the code.
• You’re now able to link a feed item to an existing product.
• The number of prices linked to a product is now shown on the products index page.

0.2.1

• Fixed some typos.
• Added a pointer to help adding a feed.

0.2

• Second beta release.
• Added support for automatic image import from the feed when creating drafts.

0.1

• Initial beta release.

Download

You can download my plugin from the WordPress plugin directory or straight from your own WordPress installation by going to the ‘Plugins’ menu and doing a search for ‘Affiliate Press’.