Price Boxes

DS V3 sees big changes around the way price comparison listings (now named ‘Price Boxes’) work, both under the covers and the way they are displayed.

From V3 you can finally edit the style of Price Boxes using a GUI editor in the admin site – no more hacking the Wordpress plugin or store template!

What’s more – the Price Box style can be shared between the plugin and stores. The styles can be found in the ‘Price Boxes’ admin tab. From here you can Preview existing boxes and edit / create new ones as shown below.

The default Price Box has also undergone some changes. Now subsequent prices from the same merchant are hidden by default – and clicking the link will dynamically include them in the result (you can disable this behaviour by opting for the ‘flat’ Price Box theme instead).

As an example over how much you can change the appearance of Price Boxes – this is another supplied style, named ‘category’.

Again – there is a flat variant of this style if you prefer to include all prices for a merchant.

Selection of which Price Box to use is in the ‘General Settings’ of each store – and a new menu appears in the updated Wordpress plugin where you can pick which one to use as a default.

Users of the Wordpress plugin who use the shortcode syntax can override this on a per query basis if desired, i.e.

[ds query='+elephant' pricebox=coolblue]

to opt for the ‘coolblue’ pricebox style for this particular query.

Talking of the Wordpress plugin, this release also sees client-side caching added to the plugin. With this enabled the plugin will cache Price Box results locally until the designated expiry time elapses (previously the plugin would contact your DS server each time). This results in much less bandwidth being used between your WP install and your DS server and is highly recommended.

Export Sites

V3 also sees the introduction of a new site type – named an Export site. This is a special type of site in that it allows you to export DS product categories into a 3rd party system like Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla (basically anything that supports the MetaWeblog API system) as individual posts.

This is ideal for those of you that want to quickly build a store site outside of the native DS store builder. All you have to do is define the mappings between DS categories and the target system categories and away you go (you can also edit the template used to create the pages).

DS remembers which products have already been created, so if you run a subsequent import for the same Export site only new products will be added.

New Networks

V3 also sees support added for Google Affiliate Network (GAN), LinkShare and SilverTap feeds. There is also an API Search client for LinkShare.

DS Free, Lite and Pro

From V3 there are three versions of Datafeed Studio available to purchase which vary in the number of feeds, sites and support level on offer.

See the order page for more details.

Upgrading and Licenses (Important)

If you are an existing V2 (or earlier) Datafeed Studio customer then you will need a new license BEFORE to upgrading to DS V3.

if you purchased V2 in 2010 then you are entitled to a FREE upgrade to DS V3 Pro. If you ordered prior to 2010 then there is a charge of £49 for a new license, should you choose to upgrade.

To obtain a new license send your existing ‘license.txt’ file to support along with the email address the license is registered against to start arranging the payment/delivery of a new one.

Once you have your new license the new version of DS can be installed in the usual manner (see the README.txt for full details).

Datafeed Studio V2.4

New for this release is the introduction of a handy Wordpress plugin so you can display ‘price compare boxes’ (content units) within the pages or posts of your Wordpress blog using products that are in your personal Datafeed Studio product database.

See this Wii Mario Kart page for an example of a Wordpress blog using this feature.

(Currently your blog must be on the same host as your Datafeed Studio installation – Javascript versions will follow).

Of course, unlike other content unit solutions, with Datafeed Studio you keep 100% of your commissions ;-p

For more information on this new plugin see the the new ‘extra/wordpress/studio’ folder included in the Datafeed Studio distribution zip file.

The other major feature of V2.4 is click reference tracking. Yes, you can now give each of your sites a unique tag which will be passed through to the affiliate network for tracking purposes. You can also, with the new snappily titled “$INCLUDE_PRODUCT_ID_ON_CLICK_REFERENCES” configuration setting opt to append the product key to this reference so you can tell exactly what site and product generated the commission for you!

I’ve been using this on my sites for the last week or so and I’m already wondering how I managed without this feature – no more guessing what page generated a sale.

This release also sees the addition of support for the Affiliate Future affiliate network which has been requested by a number of users.

Other changes in this release include increased flexibility of boolean product title searching. Note that the Admin site now no longer implicitly adds a ‘+’ prefix before each word allowing you to build more complex queries with AND (+), OR or NOT (-) prefixes yourself. See here for more information on how to construct boolean searches.

What else? Hmm…corrected scaling images on the admin search results page, and you can now sort the result columns by clicking on the column title. On the Amazon side, you can now import multiple Amazon products at once, and the application will also check if a product has already been added to prevent duplicate Amazon products in your database.

Apart from this, there’s a few minor bug fixes here and there, including 404 error codes for missing products (you’ll find a new 404.html template page for you to customise in the folder of the theme you use).

For more complete details see the CHANGELOG file in the distribution.

As usual, you can download the latest version from the download page and installation / upgrade instructions are available in 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.