View Full Version : Product Display List
I have searched for this info but I am uncertain as how to implement it.
I would like the Product Display List to shoe "Tarot" items.
Clearly there isn't a Product ID for tarot.
What I want to mimic is the result you get from entering tarot into the search box.
Many thanks
Chris
Hi,
Sorry for not returning to you sooner.
Are you looking to just output the results obtained when a search is conducted for "Tarot"?
Therefore, hard coding the search in?
Thanks
Amo
Yes!? I just want surfers who come from my website to see a lsit of "Tarot" associated items, without them doing anything!
It is hard to believe that none of the 69 viewers of this post can offer any help :eek:
Maybe I have not explained myself clearly enough.
What I want is when someone clicks on the Shop Window link on my website, the products displayed under the "Hot Picks" are all about "Tarot".
So can I send "Tarot" to the search bar and implement it?
Chris
I see where you are coming from Cougar. I have a similar problem, maybe more severe.
My site is concerned entirely with hosiery and I currently use a number of data feeds to create some shop pages.. The shop is a very small part of the site.
In each shop page I want to include only hosiery products, spefically tights/pantyhose from a single manufacturer. I want to combine the feed from shopwindow with the other feeds.
This was ever so easy using the old Affiliate Window custom content as I simply added a few filters to get a nice little bit of HTML to paste into the relevant page in my site.
With the shopwindow tools I am totally lost. It all seems to be a hugely complex tool for a simple job. More suited to general shopping site rather than simple feeds to niche sites.. or am I missing something?
Can anyone give any hints as to how to start tackling this.
gjindancer
19-04-07, 16:35
There are a number of ways already detailed on the forum, either hard code your menu, or add code to the index.php
http://www.shopwindowforum.com/showthread.php?t=67&highlight=hard code
also - you could always make your index into the actual category page by inserting some code to jump immediately to the category you require..
Hard coding the links is best though..
Dan
Dan
Thanks for your reply but for those of us forced to look at this shopwindow stuff because of the demise of the Affiliate Window Custon Content the one word we do not want to see is "code".... hard code, modify code.. no thanks, I just want to have a little HTML generated for me that I can cut and paste into my site and see the products I asked for. Products filtered by supplier, brand and product name keyword.
I am sure I am not alone in this.
I use a WYSIWYG program to build and maintain my web site (over 600 pages in size with just a few pages needing product feed). I have no interest in learning all about PHP etc.
Sorry to rant but in my job, as an IT professional incidentally, I spend a lot of my time trying to keep programmers focused on writing stuff that does the job rather than going off writing something "cool" or "clever" that doesn't make life easier for users. It doesn't help my mood that it was the AW suport team who said to use this forum for answers, after they replied to my initial question on the topic with: "Yes this is possible. It does require you to edit the templates", but with no indication of how.
gjindancer
19-04-07, 18:17
Excuse me - but I didn't write the thing, and I'm not part of shopwindow. I was just offering advice..:confused:
I only dabble in PHP a little myself, but I've often found working with joomla and oscommerce etc... you have to learn a little to get it to do what you want.
I don't know much about whats happened previously on affilliate window either so I can't comment. Seems to me though - the easier it is, the more people can do it and the less of the market you can control for yourself - but what do I know?? :o
gjindancer
19-04-07, 18:18
Oh and BTW Hard Coding the links just means replacing them with normal HTML Links...
Sorry Dan I wasn't getting at you, it was just your reply that I was replying to when I finally decided to sound off.
Response from those who should be helping seems rather lacking!!
My rant was caused by the fact that I AW/SW seem to be making things harder rather than easier.
With most of the affilate systems I deal with I can simply see a piece of code for each product I want to include on my page and cut and past it into my site, it is not clever but it works.
I guess this is hard coding, but importantly I am not doing the coding I am just taking the appropriate code and inserting it.. Frankly that is all the coding I want to do.
As for controlling the market.. well my site is very specialised, not a general store, and I have a lot of visitors because of very good Google rankings. I want to present a very controlled range of products of direct relevance to my site content. With minimal work and disruption to my site.
From the forum I feel others are in the same boat.
That may site deals with hosiery, and being in the UK that means tights, it doesn't help that the SW searchs don't know what tights are!
I am hoping that the support staff will read the forum and perhaps get back to the developers with some comments.
I guess what I want to do is to query the SW data myself and get the results in good old plain html that I can cut and paste and change if required, rather than having to code up the whole thing.
With deep linking I can produce "http://www.awin1.com/swclick.php?a=42958&m=30&c=135&q=Falke" which gives all the Falke brand lingerie from Mytights.com .. which looks hopeful.
Pasting that into a browser simply brings up the SW site with the correct products. But I just want the "Products" part of that page as a part of my page but I can't for the life of me see how to do it.
I shold perhaps raise my concerns in the deep linking part of the forum ...
ushop-online
19-04-07, 19:06
You have to be patient - I had to wait nearly a year for Shop Window to come back you won't have to wait anywhere as long for Content units to come back.
Confuscius
19-04-07, 19:13
I may be wrong but I thought that you could still edit an existing custom content unit albeit it will fetch fewer results over time as merchants remove their data. Alternatively, some other networks do provide 'content units' and they probably have tarot items in their inventory.
A 'tarot' search returns 701 results giving 70 pages of content units at 10 items per page. If I try and cut the div that contains the product list and paste it into another page then the only problems are the fact that there are embedded links not required for a content unit.
Perhaps, AW could set up a Shop Window installation that in effect created standard content without the links off to a category or individual product - all you would have to do then is run the search that you wanted (including choosing how many products per page and sort order) - then you would view the source code cut out what was required and then edit/replace css/style tags, affiliate ID,etc to blend with your existiing site. This would be about a page of simple instructions to follow.
Just for fun, I set this up myself for my own personal use and once set up it takes less than 2 minutes to add a new block of content to a static site. In fact this is far quicker than the content unit production time used to take albeit you do get fixed content because of the process used but if all people want is a different block of content on say 5 or 6 pages then it is not a lot of work to keep it up to date-ish.
Just my approach to this issue at this time.
Paul
gjindancer
19-04-07, 19:15
Cutting and pasting a link into your website is still possible - this whole shopwindow however, is about having a shop which is always up to date - one that you do not have to change yourself.
We have many affiliate sites where we add in a bit of html for the product to appear with its correct link - however - THIS IS DIFFERENT - its dynamic.
However its not as good as it could be, and the support is rather lacking:
Adult content is displayed regardless of switching it off in the control panel, and while you can control what products are avialable in your menu, you can't stop customers searching or stumbling upon products that you do not want on your site.
So for all the affilliates who have managed to use this for their "specialised" site, customers will still be able to view all categories through the search section, the only solution is to disable it.
However you dont have to use this software, stick to what you know! - unfortunately until the software is upgraded a bit, thats all I will be able to do too!!
Hi All,
Just a quick post to clarify.
ShopWindow Toolset
The ShopWindow Toolset allows for product comparison functionality to be integrated within your affiliate site.
When developing and offering the ShopWindow Toolset to affiliates such as yourselves, our aim has not been to replace the content unit tool.
These are two different tools used for different purposes. We are going to be releasing Content Units again at some point this year.
Customising Client Software Data e.g Tarot Results
To customise Client Software, you are required to have knowledge of HTML and PHP (as previously highlighted). With this knowledge, you will be able to customise the presentation and data that is output through your shop, so that particular categories are searched and displayed to your users.
We have provided example parameters for this, within Appendix 1, available here (http://www.shopwindowforum.com/showthread.php?t=8) and within your affiliate admin areas).
Data issues including Adult Content
We are working on refining the data provided to us by our merchants. This includes a measure where we identify each feed that contains products deemed to be of adult nature. Please bare in mind that this is a gradual process, and although we are making progress this is an on going project.
If you identify a merchant that you feel offers products of an adult nature and requires flagging, please do contact me directly so that I can look into this straight away.
ShopWindow Support
I am sorry to hear that we may not have met your expectations with regards to our support. I have posted previously detailing what we as a network offer support on, and this can be found here (http://www.shopwindowforum.com/showthread.php?t=72).
If you do experience issues that you feel are not being answered in this forum, please do not hesitate to contact me directly so that I can look into this for you.
Please do remember guys, we are here to help you. Although we have released this as beta (because of the refinement of data etc), we appreciate that we need to continue on improving the dataset etc to ensure that your users are provided the results expected (and you guys get commissions). This is what will help to make ShopWindow a better Toolset for all.
Again, my contact details are below if any of you guys would like a chat.
Thanks
Amo
Amarath Singh Sokhi
ShopWindow Integration Manager
Digital Window Ltd
amarath.sokhi@digitalwindow.com
Tel: 020 8269 4853
www.digitalwindow.com
Amo
Again thank you for the replies...
I think you need to speak to whoever maintains http://www.affiliatewindow.com/affiliates/shopwindow/customcontent.php and ask then to make it a little more clear what is going on.
It read to me like the Custom Content Units were being phased out and being replaced by the Shop Window Toolkit. I now see that the word "revise" is used. Perhaps a clear statement that new CCUs are in development as part of the Shop Window Toolkit and will be available via SW soon would avoid confusion.
Chris
Hi Chris,
Thanks for pointing that out :)
I will look into the information communicated on this page and see what can be done.
Cheers
Amo
I suppose, you could try installing your shopwindow, then find the url/urls of the pages it produces that you want.
then, just iframe the shopwindow into an html page.
Crappy work around, but it could work.
You're the first IT professional ive ever known of who isn't interested in code btw. :D
Confuscius
20-04-07, 17:23
Yin and Yang time! I am not an IT professional but am interested in code! :confused:
Paul
Without wishing to take this thread too far off topic I feel I must respond to Andy's observation.
I am indeed an IT professional, I even get to use the letters MBCS and CITP after my name to prove it. (Member of the British Computer Society, Chartered Information Technology Professional. In case you wondered).
I didn't say I wasn't interested in coding, far from it, I find it fascinating, but I am not interested in writing code myself. I grew out of that some time ago.
I work for a software company and spend most of my time talking to customer and potetial customers. They like us to write code that does the job they buy the software for. They buy from us rather than our competitors because although a lot of our competitors write software that is "cleverer" than ours the customers don't like the fact that they have to spend weeks writing their own code to get the "clever" products to do what they want.
When I am putting together my shops pages on the web site I run in my own time as a hobby I want something that I can just use.
Perhaps if my day job wasn't in software I may be keen to spend my evenings and weekends coding. The new Custom Content Units will be all I need.
It wouldn't do for us all to be same.
ChrisD: hopefully you noticed there was no offence meant, the tone of your post suggests you read my post as it was intended.
Yin and Yang here too. No IT letters after my name (plenty in engineering that I used to be proud of), but I am absolutely fasinated with code, specifically PHP.
I have been thinking about your problem chris. Actually that's not quite honest and true. I have been thinking about MY problem, created by wanting to do a similar thing to your idea. Im still a long way off doing exactly what I want, but I think, once I get the correct results, it could be tweaked to do your bidding too.
Ill let you know how i get on.
Ok, update.
I have created....er...something......
It kind of does what i want it to do, I'm hoping, it also does what you want it to do chris. Hopefully, i can write decent instructions.
Copy this:
<?PHP
## alter below variables to suit
$_GET['q'] = 'tarot'; //search term
$_GET['iListLimit'] = ''; //limit of products to list
$_GET['sListSort'] = ''; // sort order # lo =(price low-high) hi =(price high-low) az = (name a-z) za =(name z-a)
$_GET['c'] = '32'; // specific category
####
require_once('global.inc.php');
require_once('includes'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'class es'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'class.page_search.php');
require_once('includes'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'class es'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'class.smarty_sw.php');
$oPage = new pageSearch($_GET['iListLimit'], $_GET['iListOffset'], '', $_GET['sListSort']);
$oSmarty= new Smarty_SW();
$oSmarty->assign('sBreadCrumbText', $oPage->getBreadCrumb(false));
$oSmarty->assign('sBreadCrumbHtml', $oPage->getBreadCrumb());
$oSmarty->assign('iProducts', count($oPage->oSearch->searchProductReturn));
//include('includes'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'elements'. DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'search_box.php');
include('includes'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'elements'. DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'keyword_suggestions.php');
include('includes'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'elements'. DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'category_suggestions.php');
if ( count($oPage->oSearch->searchProductReturn)>0 )
{
include('includes'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'elements'. DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'nav_product_list.php');
// define array to loop within include
$aProductsLoop= $oPage->oSearch->searchProductReturn;
include('includes'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'elements'. DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'product_display_list.php');
}
else
{
include('includes'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'elements'. DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'hot_picks.php');
}
include('includes'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'elements'. DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'featured_merchants.php');
include('includes'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'elements'. DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'category_tree.php');
$oSmarty->display('search_specifics.tpl');
?>
Save that as 'index.php' and upload it to your API root (the same directory as Goto.php) overwriting the original (make sure you keep the original as a backup)
Copy this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>{#siteTitle#} - Where do you want to shop today?</title>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{$templatePath}/css/styles.css" type="text/css">
</head>
<body>
{if $iProducts>0}
{include file="elements`$DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR`product_display_list .tpl"}
{else}
<div class="sw_error">
<h3>No Results Found</h3>
<p>We could not find anything to match your search. Please refine your search terms.</p>
</div>
{include file="elements`$DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR`hot_picks.tpl"}
{/if}
</div>
</body>
Save that as 'search_specifics.tpl' and drop it in templates/YOURCHOSENTEMPLATE/
Thats it. The .tpl ive posted doesn't have a heading, search box or a footer.
You can adjust the variables at the top of your new index.php to adjust the page for whatever search term you want, the amount of products you want to show and the order in which to show them.
this works for me, hope it does something for you. let me know mate!:D
I am so embarassed :o
I gave up hope that anyone was going to offer any help that I just haven't checked back.
In my defence I have just changed jobs and things have been frenetic :D
I have read all the post with interest and now Andy will have a go at your suggestion and I will report back soon.
Thanks anyway for taking the time to help.
Chris
Andy that is almost perfect ;)
Unfortunately there isn't an esoteric (or similar) category so I removed the category ID alltogether.
Is it possible to still get the category list on the left or at least a serach box at the top? :eek:
Chris
Should be possible yeah.
try adding:
{include file="elements`$DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR`search_box.tpl"}
to the .tpl where you want the search box to be.
in index.php directly below$oSmarty= new Smarty_SW();
Add:
include_once(HOME_PATH.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'includ es'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'elements'.DIRECTORY_SEPAR ATOR.'search_box.php');
That should work. I haven't tested it though.
To add the nav menu, you would have to add:
include_once(HOME_PATH.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'includ es'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'elements'.DIRECTORY_SEPAR ATOR.'category_tree.php');
around where you added the search box include in index,php.
then in the .tpl add:
<div id="sw_nav">
{include file="elements`$DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR`category_tree.tpl"}
</div>
Somewhere, can't think where off the top of my head. I think its above <div class="sw_container">, but might be below. Just play around and you'll get it.
Good luck
Andy you are a star :cool:
That works exactly as I wanted it!
I didn't use the Nav code as when you use the search box the normal screen appears.
I really can't thank you enough.
Chris
I accept cash, cheques, gold bullion and camels!! :D