More Affiliate Datafeed Plugin Q&As
I’ve had a lot of new questions about The Affiliate Datafeed Profit System plugin this week, so I thought it would be a good idea to put some of those online for everyone else to benefit from…
Q: Is cron required to use the ADPS2 Plugin?
A: No it’s not required at all 
Q: Can cron be used to fully automate the ADPS2 Plugin?
A: Yes! You can set a cron to update your datafeeds, plus you can set a cron to add new content to your site.
Q: Can ADPS filter the merchant feed by keyword or category?
A: Not this version no. We have that on our list of potential features for future versions but there’s currently no ETA for it.
Q: Is there a special price or discount for customers who bought the original non plugin datafeed tool a couple of years ago?
A: Yes! The current introductory price is the special discounted price Because this tool is a complete rebuild and not just an upgrade, I decided to offer it at a discounted introductory price for both previous users of the old tool, and new early adopters who are willing to try it out when there aren’t any reviews or opinions out yet because it’s so new. Once the introductory period is over, the price will go up.
These are all of the questions I can think of for now, but as more come up I’ll post them online here for everyone. If you haven’t seen the original set of questions and answers, you’ll find those on the ADPS2 Info page.
Also See: ADPS2 News & Updates
May 1st, 2008 at 10:26 am
Additional information about how the random future date feature works:
One of the most powerful features of the ADPS2 is the random and future post dating. At the moment posts can be scheduled up to 7 days into the future, and soon I’ll have some enhancements available which allow you to designate more flexibility into this. Instead of the default 7 days for example, you may be able to choose 14, 30, or possibly even a custom number of days.
When the posts are generated though, the timestamps are created randomly based on several things. The first few posts are usually dated for the same day as you run the script, with all the rest of them randomly dated for any day or time over the next 7 days.
If you configure ADPS to only create a few posts at once though - usually less than 4 or 5 - then those will be dated with the sooner dates. So they may end up all posting at different times on the same day you run the script, or a couple may post the next day, but none of them will be dated for 3-7 days into the future.
The more posts you have being created at once, the more random future dated posts you’ll get. I find that putting my post range from 20-30 tends to generate at least 3 posts per day every day for 7 days.
May 2nd, 2008 at 5:55 am
Q: How does ADPS2 handle categories?
At the moment ADPS2 puts all product posts into one category. This is supposed to be configurable by you in the admin panel, but a small bug was found in that last week so at the moment it puts the posts into the default WP category. A maintenance release is due out in about a week which will fix that problem though
The script does not allow you to put some posts into one category and others into another category though. That’s on our wish list for future version releases.
On my demo site, I renamed the default “uncategorized” category in WordPress to “Gardening Products”, and all of the datafeed product posts are put into that category. I don’t bother showing the category links in my design template though, because since that’s the only category I have set up on the demo site I felt it wasn’t needed design-wise.
I’ve done other types of setups on other sites too. I rename the default WP category to something like “[niche] products”, then I’ll add other categories such as articles, tips, news, and so on. This way all the shopping products are in one category, while related content is in its own relevant categories too.
If I’m just creating a site with products only though, I don’t bother listing or linking the categories in my design template.
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:51 am
Memory Requirements or Errors
On some servers and in some cases, when you try to run the ADPS2 posting feature, you may receive an error something like this:
“Allowed memory size of Xxx bytes exhausted”
Usually this means you’re trying to open and/or manipulate files larger than the default allowed by your server settings.
With a datafeed script of any kind, if you choose to use very large merchant feeds, you can run into this problem. One work around of course is to simply select merchants with smaller feeds, or with ADPS2 you can simply reduce the number of feeds you’re using on your site.
Since ADPS2 combines up to 5 datafeeds together, the total combination of products across all the feeds can be quite large. If you’re using 5 merchants who have 100,000 product apiece for example, the script is going to be working with 500,000 products at once. And this can be a problem for some servers.
You can ask your hosting company to increase the PHP memory limit, or you can try the htaccess work around found here (new window).
So to recap:
1. Use smaller datafeeds
2. Use less merchant feeds (3 instead of 5 for example)
3. Ask your host to increase the PHP memory limit
4. Increase the PHP limit yourself in your htaccess file
May 21st, 2008 at 10:23 am
Hello ,
I have a few questions about your data feed product. I greatly appreciate any feed back you can provide.
1. I understand there is a limit of 5 merchant feeds that you can use at this time. Do you have plans to allow unlimited feeds / unlimited merchants? Or is there the possibility to have the ability to set up multiples of 5 such as a total of 15 feeds and each week/month you rotate the different 5 feeds from 5 different merchants so that you can test what merchants/feeds provide the best results?
2. Can you have the option to set up the current five merchant feeds into particular categories? For example , lets say all five merchants provide the same type of product such as baby car seats? Can you have a category where baby car seats can be displayed by all merchants? The customer would then have pages of baby car seats to choose from? This would work with other categories as well - baby toys , baby clothing, baby cribs , baby high chairs etc.
Any info that you can provide will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you ,
Jason
May 21st, 2008 at 10:41 am
Hello ,
I have a few questions about your data feed product. I greatly appreciate any feed back you can provide.
One more question - can I have the option to add my own content / product description etc?
Thank you again
May 21st, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Hi Jason,
I’ll answer each of your questions in turn, and try not to write a book in the process
We may increase the merchant’s allowed with a later 3.x version, but I don’t want to reveal too much of that just yet. With the way ADPS is currently set up to run though, trying to combine products from too many merchants might make your site bog down and/or die from memory issues.
You can currently change your merchants at any time you’d like to though. You could even run “15″ merchants with one install if you’re willing to do the extra manual work. You’d have to set up 5 of your merchants in the configuration area, run the datafeed retrieval, then run the posting. Once those are finished then you could go into the configuration and set it up with the next 5 merchants. Then do the feed retrieval and posting, and repeat the process for your next 5 merchants.
The configuration changes can’t be done automatically with cron or anything though, so each time you wanted to add more products from more than 5 merchants to your site, you’d have to repeat that process.
Not yet
The current 2.2 version allows you to select the category you want new posts placed into, but it does not allow you to filter by product types. The version I have in beta testing at the moment DOES allow that though, and I hope to have it ready for release in just a few days.
Yes, ADPS2 runs on a regular WordPress install, so you’re free to created and edit any posts just like you would normally be able to
Hope that all helps and if you have additional questions, please feel free to ask. I’m sending this to you via email as well to make sure you don’t miss it
- Kathy
May 21st, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Kathy,
Any updates on the relase where we can use data feeds from different providers such as Link Share , Commission Junction and or combination of all etc?
Thank you ,
June 23rd, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Hi,
I came across this plugin and it sounds intriguing. Is it possible to setup -more- for each post and how many characters post introduction will have? Idea being - I don’t want to take up entire blog front page for just one post with 5 products. Instead I just want to publish summaries of posts and have “Read more” link with each post.
thanks!
June 23rd, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Hi Max,
ADPS doesn’t have a setting of it’s own to do this, but you can change it up in your WordPress templates just like you can pretty much anything else
You can configure your theme/template to show just the excerpt of each post on the index and category pages for example, and it will simply display the first 50 words or so from the post. Some template tags will allow you to designate how many words to display too, so it just depends on the theme you’re using.
On one of my sites I do use a plugin for this though. It’s called Evermore and it lets me have the first product’s picture with a sentence or two of it showing on the main and category pages, then the rest of the products and descriptions are shown on the individual pages.
I’ll send this to you via email too just in case you didn’t bookmark this site yet.
Hope this helps and let me know if you have additional questions!
Kathy