Amazon Products Feed - Associates Script

Advanced Guide

This guide is meant to compliment the Amazon Products Feed - Beginners guide. If you have not done so, please browse through it first to get a feel for the script. If you have the Amazon Products Feed installed, configured, and working on your server, and are ready to see how to customize the script further...then this is the guide for you. You should always check the project page for updated information and forums for help.

Contents

1. Templates Results
   1. Variables
   2. Page Template
   3. Products Template
   4. Item Template
   5. Other Templates
   6. FrontPage Users
2. Results
   1. Search Box
3. Including search results into your web pages
   1. SSI Include
   2. PHP Include
4. Advanced Options
   1. APF options
   2. Nav Menu
5. Change Languages

Templates

Amazon Products Feed utilizes templates to display the products in a browser, there are several templates, but the most important are the Page, Products, & Item Templates.

The script comes with a default set of templates and you do not need to customize a template if you are happy with how it displays. For example, if you are happy how the item template displays the item, then you do not need to make your own item template the script will use the one from the default directory. You can also use different sets of templates to match different sections of your website, or if you desire a different look.

In this version of the script the templates always use the same names they are just organized in different subdirectories under the template directory.

The default templates are in a subdirectory called default and are named:

If you wish to use a different set of templates you would create another subdirectory, like the wap subdirectory, and use the same names for the files in that location:

Samples of all of the templates can be found in the tar file of the script in the cgi-bin/apf4/templates/default directory.

Variables

These templates use variables to display certain content, which makes it easy to design. Decide where you want the item's picture to go and place the variable there in the HTML. When making these templates, it's easiest to look at the sample template to get an idea of how each variable works. For a list of all the variables that you can use, click here. One important thing to remember when using these variables, they must have the correct format or the script will ignore them.

Always use

Also remember that these are case sensitive

Is not the same as

You can look here for a comprehensive list of variables, this is just meant to explain how the most common variables work and get you started using variables. To use these variables effectively, simply make the HTML for your page and just plug in the variable where you want the information to appear.

The most important variable is:

Your page template must have this in order to display products. This variable simply places any results of the script at this spot.

Other common variables for your page template are:

Some common variables for your products template

Page Template

The page template is the basic HTML design of the webpage that the script results will display in. The most important variable you need on this page is

This is where the script will place the results that the user searches for (the products). You must have this on your page template or it will not work. When you save your templates, it's important to name it page.template .

One of the easiest ways to make the script results match your site is to copy the HTML from one of your pages, then build a table where you want the results to appear then add the variables like above.

Now that you have the page template done, you're ready to modify how the products look.

Products Template

The products template specifies exactly how each product will appear within the page template. The contents of this template are automatically repeated for each product displayed on a page.

Item Template

The item template specifies how the item information will look when you click on an individual item from the products results page. It utilizes the page template for the main HTML of the page.

Other Templates

There are several other templates that you can use, if you've mastered the page, product, and item templates, you'll have no problem modifying these.

• larger_image_templates - the HTML to display the large product image
• browse_menu_templates - the HTML to display the browse cateogries
• nav_menu_templates - the HTML to display the navigation menu (if used)

The next few templates are used to display the used and third-party products

• sellersearch_templates - the HTML to display SellerSearch results
• sellerprofile_templates - the HTML to display seller profile
• thirdparty_products_templates - the HTML to display third-party products

FrontPage Users

If you use FrontPage or a similar program to design and manage your site, you can use it to generate a page template. You do have to make a few modifications that are fairly simple. Make a new web page inside FrontPage with the design of your site but the content area blank (easiest way is to copy and paste a web page that has the look you want, then delete the content). Find the spot where you would like the script content to appear and type

Save this file to your desktop and name it page.template. It's important to note how FrontPage writes hyperlinks and images to HTML. Since FrontPage saves all files/images to the same folder, it doesn't specify the directory, but this template will reside in a different directory than your pages and images, so you need to modify a bit.

Open the page in a text editor (notepad is fine) and use the search feature. Search for "href" this will highlight all of the hyperlinks in your page one at a time. If it is a hyperlink that has a full URL already, don't modify it.

By default FrontPage saves them as:

You simply need to specify the URL, change this to

Same idea for your images, search for "src", and change

To:

If you use background images anywhere in your site, search for "background" and change:

To:

As soon as your done, save the file, then FTP it to the proper subdirectory on your server (/cgi-bin/apf4/templates/whatever/)

Results

To modify the results that the script produces, you can specify it in the URL.

You take the initial URL of the script

and add the variables after it with the first variable preceded by a ?

More variables can be added with all of them preceded by a &

The most commonly used URL options are

All available URL options are listed here.

Search Box

To add a search box to other pages of your site, simply cut-n-paste the code below:

Inserting Search Results Into Your Web Pages

You can insert search results into any of your web pages using a couple of ways. Search engines will even index these as part of your web page.

SSI Include

This stands for server-side includes, which means that when the page is requested by the users browser, your server combines this with the rest of the HTML. To do this, most hosting companies require that your pages have .shtml extensions. You can try to use these with .htm extensions to see if it will work, and some hosting companies let you specify .htm pages to utilize SSI Includes. But you need to contact your hosting for details on that.

To use an SSI Include, it's very simple, let's say you want to display the top selling video games, then from your URL:

To include these results, remove the domain name from the URL and use this

Now one roadblock to this, is it will display all of the content from your page template as well. So you should modify your page and products template to get the results you want.

Basically a page template with just:

This will work, since you don't need the <HEAD><TITLE> elements. And maybe a simpler products template so it won't take up as much room.

PHP Include

You should only use a php include if your pages are coded in php because they require the .php extension to run properly. If your pages are not php, use the SSI include above.

To do the same example as above with php use:

<?php
include_once("http://www.yoursite.com/cgi-bin/apf4/amazon_products_feed.cgi?Operation=ItemSearch&SearchIndex=VideoGames&BrowseNode=471280");
?>

APF Options

APF options were designed so you can customize your templates even further than standard HTML. The options and the HTML they affect are enclosed in a special comment tag.

Notice the exclamation points, they separate the different parts of the command. <!--apf tells the script that options will follow. All options must be proceeded by an & to separate them and the last option is indicated by following it with an !. Anything following that ! through !--> is considered the HTML you want to control. If the option doesn't contain HTML, like for including a text file, the exclamation points still need to be there. The examples below will show how these options can be used.

Example 1:

Example 2:

Example 3:

Navigation Menu

If you look at this page you may notice a navigation menu on the left of the products. This menu changes as you choose different categories. It will display the different sub-categories for whatever category you are in. You can change how this looks by modifying the nav_menu template. To use this in your page use the following tag in your page template above your %%products_html%% as in this sample page template. This utilizes the APF Options described above.

The Navigation menu uses the nav_menu.template.

Change Languages

Languages work like the templates. Simple text files of all the variables that contain the text the script displays that does not come from Amazon. If you wish to create your own language file please use the sample English file as a starting point and be sure and send us a copy so we can share it with others. We would like to provide as many different languages as possible.

You specify which language to use in the URL with language. &language=french

To display multiple languages in HTML there is a special charset (character set) called Unicode. This is the format that Amazon sends their results in and so it is what my script uses. To use accented characters in the language files you must use Unicode entities. Entities are just &#(a number);. I wrote a script to display the characters and show the entity for each so you can use them in your language file - Unicode Generator.

This documentation is a derivative work of one originally created by OneClickDesigns.com

This document was updated by LABBS, and created using Webepigenetics WebeDNA-Lite.
Last modified: October 15^th 2010