Help Wanted - A Tool to Add an Affiliate Store to Your WhyPark Site

The working name for my application is DataFeed2Pages. It will take a CSV file like an affiliate datafeed and create a custom page for each product in the feed. To see an example, visit http://www.fargoweddings.info/tag9461-beach-wedding-dress.cfm.

The beta version works by having you browse to the Custom Pages section of the domain to which you want to add an affiliate store. The software then gets the SiteID of that domain (and displays the title of the site so you can be sure you've selected the correct domain). You then load up your CSV file of affiliate products. The first row of the CSV file MUST contain the field headers. For example:

These fields are fairly standard across all affiliate datafeeds, but that doesn't matter since you can map any field you want to be displayed in the Page Summary or Page Content fields. The two fields that ARE important are the Categories field and Title field. These two fields are required because the Categories field is used in creating the Tag for that page, and the Title field is used as the Page Title. If your CSV file does not have either of these columns, it will not work. Any other field is optional, but those two are vitally important.

Once you have your CSV file loaded, you create the templates for the Page Summary and Page Content fields using placeholders in much the same way that you create a WhyPark Layout. For example, your Page Summary box may look like this:

<img src="[[ThumbURL]]" alt="[[Title]]" style="float: left;" />
[[Description]]
<br clear="left" />

While your Page Content box looks like this:

<a href="[[URL]]"><img src="[[ImageURL]]" alt="[[Categories]]" style="float: left;" /></a>
[[Description]]<br /><br />
Product ID: [[ProductID]]<br />
Price: $[[Price]]<br />
<a href="[[URL]]">Buy Now</a>

Now when the software runs through your CSV file (using the example CSV data from above), it will create a page that has a Title of "Carnation Carnival" and a Page Tag of "Bouquets". The Page Summary will have a thumbnailed image with the alt attribute set to the page title that floats to the left of the text in teh Description field of teh CSV file. When your visitor clicks through to that page, they will see a full sized image with the alt attribute set to the category that also floats to the left of the page text, and this image will be hyperlinked to the affiliate site. The Page Content will also show the description again as well as the Product ID, the Price, and your affiliate link with the anchor text of Buy Now.

Currently, there is no limit to the size of the CSV file that the software will handle. I have successfully loaded up a CSV file with 450,000+ rows (but you better have a LOT of RAM!). However, there are some limits due to the WhyPark interface. If you have Javascript enabled in Internet Explorer (and who doesn't these days?) once you've added about 300 custom pages, your WhyPark admin panel will slow to a crawl because the spiffy javascript that let's you drag and drop pages to reorder them runs for so long. If you disable Javascript before running the software, this won't occur until you've added about 9000 custom pages, and once you hit 10,000 custom pages the page will take so long to load that the WhyPark server will begin to spit out errors. Craig has mentioned the possibility of implementing pagination on the Add Custom Page tab, and he is also looking into creating an API that won't have these issues or use up so much bandwidth.

So, now that I hope you understand what the software currently does, I'm hoping you'll help guide the finishing touches.