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Installation
When you buy the extension you should receive a package called pkg_affiliatewindow.zip. You upload and install this as normal using the Joomla installer, you should find that it installs the Affiliate Window component, plus the categories, featured merchants, popular queries, and search modules and the affiliate window content plugin.
Getting an API Key
The extension uses the Affiliate Window ProductServe API to automatically fetch a product feed, and display the products on your site. In order to actually display any products you need to get an API key.
Firstly, you will need to sign up for an account at http://www.affiliatewindow.com/uk/ (if you haven't already). Then you will enable the ProductServe API (on the advanced tab of your account), once you have done this the API Key will be displayed on the page. (Don't confuse this key with the datafeed password, which will be the key displayed on the Manage API Credentials before you have enabled the ProductServe API - if you try to use this key, it will not work.)
Once you have an API key, you need to supply it in the component configuration. In your Joomla admin, go to components->Affiliate Window->Admin, and click the Options tab. Then supply your key for the API Key option, and click 'save'. This is actually all that you need to do for now. If you click the 'Browse Products' link, you should now see the shop displayed.
If you don't see any products, the 'Check System Status' link will tell you what the problem is.
Adding Products
You can use the 'Browse Products' link to directly browse the Affiliate Window product database from your Joomla admin.
There are several ways to add products to your site.
1) You can add a complete store to your site, simply by creating a new Joomla menu item of type Affiliate Window->Shop. This will automatically include the product category menu, featured merchants, popular queries and search box - you can turn these off in the component options if you prefer not to have them.
2) If you prefer to display a single category with sub-categories, make a menu item of type 'category'. The sub-categories will link to pages of type 'product list', showing the products within the category.
3) To display a list of products in a category, make a menu item of type 'product list'.
4) Show a list of retailers by making a menu item of type "retailers".
5) You can display a single product by creating a menu item of type "product", you will need to select the product using its id number.
6) You can add single products, or product lists, or the results of product searches to Joomla articles using the affiliate window content plugin, which is distributed as part of the affiliate window package. This is probably the most flexible method of adding your products, because it makes it easy to include your own content in addition to that served up by the API.
Using the Content Plugin
Make sure that the affiliate window content plugin is enabled in the Joomla plugin manager.
You can use the Affiliate Window->Browse products link to find single products or lists of products that you want to add to a Joomla article. Then just use a simple short code to add your chosen products to an article. You will see that the article embedding code is displayed with the product results, making it very easy to find the code to use.
Examples of the short code are:-
- {affiliatewindow category=100} - to display products from category number 100
- {affiliatewindow category=100;page=2} - display the second page of results from category 100
- {affiliatewindow category=100;maxresults=25} - display up to 25 results from category 100
- {affiliatewindow product=17548226} - display a single product with id 17548226
- {affiliatewindow search=floral perfume;category=99;maxresults=25} - search for products with keywords floral perfume, in category 99, show up to 25 results
- {affiliatewindow category=99;merchant=3633} - show results from single merchant number 3633, restrict results to category 99
Sorting Results
By default, results are ordered by popularity. You can use the sort option to determine the ordering of results, for example the following will sort by price (low to high):-
{affiliatewindow search=floral perfume;category=99;maxresults=25;sort=lo}
The sort options available are:-
- popularity (Popularity)
- random (Randomly)
- lo (Price: Low-High)
- hi (Price: High-Low)
- az (Name: A-Z)
- za (Name: Z-A)
Layouts
The component uses the standard MVC Joomla design, so that you can override individual templates by placing edited copies in the html folder of your site template, in a folder call html/com_affiliatewindow. You can also override the styles by putting a css file called styles.css in the following location:-
templates/your_template_name/html/com_affiliatewindow/assets/css/styles.css
(where your_template_name refers to the actual name of your template). If that file exists then it will be loaded instead of the default styles.css stylesheet. If you want to do this, it is recommended to make a copy of the default stylesheet, which is components/com_affiliatewindow/assets/css/styles.css, then edit it as you wish.
The component also uses a set of sub-layouts, which are for elements that appear on multiple pages, such as the category tree, and featured merchants. These layouts are located in the folder components/com_affiliatewindow/sublayouts/ .These can also be overridden, by placing the overriding file in the folder
templates/your_template_name/html/com_affiliatewindow/sublayouts/
By default, the Affiliate Window shop is displayed with the category tree, featured merchants and popular queries displayed in a left hand column. This is to make it easy to set up a shop simply by creating the Joomla menu item. If you don't like this layout, you can turn off the display of these elements in the component options, and create them instead as modules in any Joomla module position that you wish. Simply find the modules in the Joomla module manager, and assign them to your chosen pages and positions.