Datafeed Studio V2.7.1 is now ready to download.

New in this release is support for custom fields, more flexibility around the import process – and some sexy new options for the Wordpress plugin (and searching in general).

Custom Fields

Custom fields allow you to associate ‘key value’ pairs against the products in your database, e.g. you might want to create a custom field named ‘Colour’ and then manually tag certain products with this field and the desired value.

You can then create custom searches to only include products that match one or more of these custom field values (along with the usual search criteria).

There’s no limit to the number of custom fields you can create in the system, and custom fields can be combined so if you had a custom field of ‘Colour’ and ‘Size’ you could perform a search for blue widgets that weigh 10kg.

New Price Compare Syntax

The next major feature is vastly more powerful searching for the Wordpress plugin – which has also been incorporated into the main admin site search, PHP get_products() API call and the ‘Price Compare this Product’ option when you edit a product.

With the quick search syntax you can combine multiple search options in just one line of text, e.g.

+xbox +360 -elite | min_price=50 max_price=100 exclude_merchants=1,2,3

Would search your product database for products that contain the words “xbox” and “360″ but would omit entries that contain the word “elite”. It would also only include products that cost between 50-100 and wouldn’t include products from merchants 1,2 or 3.

The new separator bar (pipe character ‘|’) after the search term indicates that extra options follow. You can omit the bar and extra options if you don’t need them for the search you want to perform.

Extra options have the syntax name=value (note that spaces aren’t allowed). Separate multiple extra options with a space.

Glossary of Available Extra Options

cf

Indicates a custom field, e.g. if you have created a custom field in your database named “colour”, the option cf=colour:red would include products that have this custom field with the value of ‘red’. Note the special custom field syntax of “cf=field name:field value”. Multiple “cf” options can be included in one search, e.g. “+notebook | cf=colour:black cf=hdsize:60GB”

description

Only return products that contain the value (anywhere) in their description field, e.g. description=’bass guitar’

exclude_merchants

Comma separated list of datafeed IDs to exclude from the search results, e.g. exclude_merchants=1,2,3. Handy for excluding Argos :-p

include_custom

If set to ‘on’, custom products will also be included in the search results, e.g. include_custom=on

max_price

Maximum price of products to include, e.g. max_price=100

max_results

Maximum number of results to return, e.g. max_results=25

min_price

Minimum price of products to include, e.g. min_price=50

model_number

Only return products that contain this value (anywhere) in their model_number field, e.g. model_number=S900

mykey_query

Only return the product with this key, e.g. “mykey_query=123_12345678″

only_merchants

Comma separated list of datafeed IDs to restrict the search to, e.g. only_merchants=59,92

order_direction

Direction of sorted results, one of “asc” or “desc” depending on preferred order, e.g. order_direction=desc.

order_field

Field which to sort results by, e.g. order_field=p.display_price to sort by price, or order_field=d.merchant_name to sort by the name of the merchant.

Import Process changes

You can now import more than one feed at a time on the admin interface (previously the only options were a single feed or ‘Import ALL’) by selecting the checkbox next to each feed you want to import.

The backend import process (admin/bin/import.php) which you can use to automate importing has also been extended. You can now specify a comma-separated list of feed IDs to import, e.h.

$ php import.php 1,2,3

or even specify a range of merchants, e.g.

$ php import.php a-f

will only import feeds for merchants that begin with the letters A through to F.

(The existing import options of “all” or a single feed ID are still there.)

Other Changes

There’s a new config option named ‘Include Product Name on Click References?’, which if enabled, will automatically append the product name to click references (previously only the product ID (key) was passed to the merchant).

This will help you read your affiliate network statistics and see what products are doing the business.

There’s also a few small non-critical bug fixes

Upgrading

See the README.txt file for details on upgrading from an earlier version. Note that if you are upgrading from V2.7.0 then only a single database change (see patch.sql) is needed for this release so you might just prefer executing that in phpMyAdmin (or a similar tool) instead of running the patch.php command to save time.

To download the latest version click here.

ps. if any users are interested in potentially Beta trialling voucher code integration in the New Year give me a shout. Merry Xmas :-p

I am pleased relieved (!) to announce the release of Datafeed Studio v2.5.

Wordpress Shortcode Support

Lots of new goodies in this new version, but my favourite has to be Wordpress shortcode support.

Huh?

Well, you may remember the last release included the debut of a Wordpress datafeed plugin, allowing you to display the products stored within your Datafeed Studio database inside your Wordpress page, i.e. for a displaying a price comparison box (example).

All well and good, but a bit clunky as you had to edit your Wordpress theme to include one line (to include the box) and then add two Wordpress custom fields to each post to actually display the box.

Well, it’s got even easier, by using the power of Wordpress shortcodes, you can now alternatively include Datafeed Studio powered price compare boxes anywhere within your Wordpress post or page, just by using the following syntax when writing your content within Wordpress :

[ds query='+pleo']

The above example would search your database for products matching the word ‘pleo’ (now sadly extinct, sob!) and display them within a price comparison content unit on your page.

There’s a few other options available, check out the Wordpress plugin documentation inside the extra/wordpress/dstudio for more detail. Note that by using the shortcode approach you can also display multiple price compare boxes on one page.

New Parsers

V2.5 also sees the introduction of two new parsers. First up, Datafeed Studio now supports the new Create-A-Feed type feeds that Affiliate Window is pushing heavily (against most affiliates will!).

This was trickier than anticipated as Affiliate Window don’t offer an option to download the new Create-A-Feed files in uncompressed format, just gzip or Zip.

Rather than code custom parser behaviour just for Create-A-Feed files, I’ve added a new “Post Download Script” option to parsers, where you can specify a script to run against a file after it has been downloaded.

99% of users wont need to go near this, but be aware this this option is there if you need it, and for the new Create-A-Feed parser it will call a script that will gunzip the downloaded file prior to import.

Also, a new parser is now built-in for Commission Junction datafeed files (CSV format, tab separated). Unfortunately CJ do not offer direct download URLs for their feeds so you will have to use manual (i.e. uploaded yourself) feeds with this parser. Watch this blog for a tip / script for getting around this in the near future.

Affiliate Store Changes

There’s a few new settings for the ’store/modern’ theme, including the ability to enter a contact e-mail address for your site, override the ‘Today’s Hot Deal’ text and change the footer HTML without hacking the templates.

Note that the store/modern theme, and the updated Wordpress plugin now include the product image when displaying the price compare content units. If this isn’t to your taste then you can change the default template as appropriate (or better copy the default theme to a custom theme so you don’t have to make the change if you upgrade again).

Also included is a new ‘Share Code’ option allowing you to include your own social sharing widget from the likes of AddThis or Share This on your affiliate product pages.

Download / Upgrading Instructions

For a full list of changes (over 25) for V2.5 check out the full CHANGELOG.txt within the distribution, which is available to download from here.

If you are upgrading from a previous version, see the (updated) upgrade instructions within the README.txt file.

[ds query='pleo']

anywhere within the page/post content.

Sometimes you may want to access product information contained within your affiliate datafeeds outside of a Datafeed Studio created site, e.g. inside a WordPress blog.

This post will show you how to easily achieve this if your WordPress site (or similar) resides on the same physical server as your Datafeed Studio installation. To illustrate what is possible I’ve quickly created a new WordPress site for the Pleo Toy. This WordPress theme has three columns.

The middle column is the one we are interested in – it shows all the current prices and retailers of the Pleo according to the data held in our Datafeed Studio installation.

How does this work?

Well, as our site is on the same server as Datafeed Studio we just hook into the datafeed functions with the following few lines of code :

Just paste these into the appropriate file of your WordPress theme and you can get a similar list of product prices, such as these Pleo Prices embedded in your blog or web site.

Neat, huh?

All you need to change above is :

$DS_LIB – the path to the Datafeed Studio installation “lib” folder on your server

$PUBLIC_URL – the main URL of your public Datafeed Studio site

and, of course, you want to change the product name to be something other than ‘pleo’ in the line containing the “get_products” function call

That’s it.

A future article will show a similar method integrating with WordPress custom fields to dynamically do a product price compare within WordPress.

This now means that Datafeed Studio supports feeds from five different affiliate networks. Full list :

• Affiliate Window
• BuyAt
• Paid on Results
• Share A Sale
• Trade Doubler

If you have any feedback on these parsers, or have a suggestion for a new one, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Don’t forget you are not limited to this list, you can easily create your own within the application by specifying the mapping of internal database fields to that of the CSV file you want to parse.

Datafeed Studio now supports SEO friendly URLs for your product categories and products.

Previously, Datafeed Studio URLs were pretty ugly :

http://example.com/display_product.php?mykey=123_123456789


Now, if you enable the SEO_FRIENDLY_URLS option in the configuration (enabled by default) you will get product URLs in the form :

http://example.com/123_123456789.html


Hmm…I suppose that is a slight improvement I hear you say, but wouldn’t it be great if I could choose the value of the URL myself.

Well, now you can!

The latest Datafeed Studio release has “slug” support. Every product in your database can now have an unique slug (or path or permalink, call it what you will), so you can finally have URLs of your choosing, e.g.

http://example.com/my-cool-product.html

What’s more, slug support has been added to categories, so instead of :

http://example.com/show_category.php?catid=24

You now get :

http://example.com/category-bouncy-castles

To demonstrate the new URL structure I’ve created a new baby car seat site, check it out to see the new SEO friendly URLs in action.

If you still prefer the non-SEO friendly URLs just set the SEO_FRIENDLY_URLS option to zero (this option can also be set in the site specific configuration files so you can enable/disable it on a per site basis).

Previously a site would get all of its look and feel based on the theme it was associated with, e.g. Indiana Jones Toys is associated with the store theme known as “modern”.



However, if you then wanted to make a new store site with a different look you would have to make a complete copy of the theme, e.g. “modern2″ and use that for the new site. This method still works, but is a bit tedious if all you want to do is change the font colour and a few other minor presentation changes on your new site.

So the latest release of Datafeed Studio supports local styles. When you register a new site a copy of the main CSS file (style.css) of the theme you have chosen for the new site is automatically created and placed in the site_configs folder. Now instead of using the style.css file in the theme, your site will use the new copy in the site_configs folder, this allows you to do local customisations without changing the main theme.



As an example I have created a new Baby Pushchair site, like the Indiana Jones site mentioned above, this uses the “modern” theme and I didn’t have to create a “modern2″ theme to accommodate the presentation changes I wanted to make, they are all controlled by the local CSS file, which can be edited via the new Style link which is now present for store and price compare sites on the admin home screen.

So in summary, if you want to make a new affiliate site with a radically different look, then by all means create a new theme as usual, but if your new site is just a few cosmetic changes to an existing theme, simply make your changes via the Style link.

I hope you all like this new feature – I’m sure it will help you create affiliate sites quicker and easier than the previous solution.

One great alternate use for custom products is for creating affiliate sites with completely unique content.

Instead of using the information that comes from a merchant’s datafeed (which might be used for hundreds of different sites on the Internet) you may prefer for some sites to create your products
from scratch, with your own custom content and images and then leveraging the product price comparison capability of Datafeed Studio to produce a price compare table like the one below when displaying your custom product :

This approach gives you the best of both worlds – unique content coupled with dynamic price comparison of products that match the criteria you supply.

Normally, when you build a niche online store using Datafeed Studio it is in traditional “one product, one merchant” mode, i.e. the application displays the product information directly as it comes the datafeed, with a single price, that of the merchant the product belongs to.

However, price comparison is a very effective method to increase your sales, and adds real value to your site, steering it away from that of a mere thin affiliate. The Datafeed Studio product editor allows you take advantage of this and as an advanced option allows you to provide the SQL to use to generate a dynamic price comparison of the product being viewed.

For example, let’s take a look at the rather nifty Cargo Truck product on the example Indiana Jones Toys website.

This product is taken from a Play.com datafeed and without editing the page would display just the once price from that merchant. Instead, we would prefer to display prices of this product from other retailers. By filling in the Price Compare this Product? on the backend administration interface of Datafeed Studio with the following SQL :

select * from products (match(name) against ('+indiana +jones +cargo +truck' in boolean mode)) order by merchant_name

the page instead displays all products from merchants that match the criteria specified.

Intimidated by the hairy SQL? No need to be – this SQL can be automatically generated from Datafeed Studio’s search facility. If you did a search for “indiana jones cargo truck” the software shows you the SQL query generated to do the search – all you have to do is copy’n'paste it into your product and ta-da – instant price comparison and improved conversion rates for you!