Months ago me and my buddy who work together on TFT were talking about the idea of an affiliate program for our users – to try and encourage them to promote the site amongst friends and family, and to maybe entice some of the bigger websites to send some traffic our way.

At the time I thought it would be a neat little project, but once I started listing the edge cases I noticed that this would be a bit of a slog to get right.

A combination of work and family issues stopped me from looking or even thinking about the affiliate program until recently, when my friend brought it up again.

This time instead of thinking about all the edge cases and worrying about replicating what some of the bigger affiliate systems do I brought it right back to basics.

I asked myself two questions.

1. What is an affiliate system at its most basic form.
2. What is the least amount of effort I can put in (both long and short term) in order to achieve this.

After spending maybe an hour mulling these questions over I had come up with a solution that would work.

5 hours later I had written, tested, debugged and deployed a solution that will work and will only need minor time investment to scale should we need to.

It won’t win any awards for being the most complete affiliate program in the world, but it will allow my users to make some money from the site and ultimately put more money into my pocket.

Normally I would love to go into the technical details of what I done, but how I have had to work it is such an edge case that I couldn’t possibly see it being useful to anyone. The short version is that it speaks to a couple of WordPress plugins and PayPal and to be honest will never win me a programmer of the year award.

I will add to the list over time to be sure to bookmark the post.

(Last Edited 01/04/12)

Getting custom menus into your theme – A nice introductory article by the guys at Think Vitamin.

Adding sub-page information into a parent page – This handy little code sippet comes straight from the Codex and allows you to add child page information into the layout for your parent page.

Customise the WordPress Admin Area – A guide on customising the WordPress Admin Area, useful when removing things useless to the client you are developing for.

Useful WordPress Themes, Tools and Plugins – A really big list from Smashing Magazine with links to various WordPress related content.

5 Ways to including templates in WordPress – A nice quick rundown of ways you can include template files.

Cheers to Paul for proving some of the links.

I will show you what you need to do by way of an example.  Let us suppose we need the site URL in our JavaScript code.

It is a two step process, the first step is in your PHP;

wp_enqueue_script('my_script');
$data = array('site_url' => __(site_url()));
wp_localize_script('my_script', 'php_data', $data);

So what we have done there is enqueued our script (named here, my_script) and once we have done that we set up our data array. In our case the property is site_url and it’s contents are going to be the result of site_url(). Once we have that we can call wp_localize_script, into it we pass the name of our script, the name we want to give our JavaScript object and the data we want to pass in.

Next we want to be able to access the data, so in your JavaScript file you can simply call the following (if you wanted to alert out the site URL!)

alert(php_data.site_url);

Really, really easy and really, really handy!

For more information please see the official reference.

My most sincere apologies to anyone who may have been sent somewhere as a result of visiting this site in the past few days and my genuine gratitude to the kind people who reported the issue.

I do have my own in development at the moment but until I find the time to finish it I guess this will do!

Comments are welcomed!

• How to Protect Your WordPress Blog From Getting Hacked – Pretty self explanatory, unlike a lot of WordPress related posts, this isn’t just a list of plugins that are flavour of the month (although it does suggest some). An excellent read and essential if you have a WP blog.  I will definitely look into actioning some of the points. (via @designfollow).
• 5 WordPress Security Plugins To Check Hacked WordPress Blog – Along the same lines as the first post (although obviously just a list of 5 plugins to checkout) but it covers more about what to do if your server is compromised as opposed to stopping it from getting compromised.  Again, something I should really look at. (via @UCTweets).
• 40 Essential CSS Templates, Resources and Downloads – Not much to say about this, the title really sums it up, a fair bit of filler in the list but also some gems including a nice rule generator that will work as a shiv for IE when playing with CSS3 (via @designfollow)
• Essential JavaScript and jQuery design patterns – This is an article about a free ebook that I have just downloaded and skimmed through, at first glance it looks amazingly useful.  It explains many of the core design patterns and when to use them.  It also comes with printable materials. (via @elijahmanor)

Typing I have found to be a little sensitive but I am sure I will get used to it in time!

If anyone wants to suggest apps I should be checking out please leave a comment below.

In order to do that I had to make some changes to my theme, which I figured I should document.

I went into my theme directory and created /js/themename.js

I edited the header (themename/header.php) to include jQuery and /js/themename.js…

<script src=”<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); ?>/js/jquery-1.3.2.min.js” type=”text/javascript” ></script>
<script src=”<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); ?>/js/lightword.js” type=”text/javascript” ></script>

Inside of themename.js I created my $(document).ready() call and gave it the code it required.

I uploaded /themename/header.php, /themename/js/themename.js and themename/js/jquery-1.3.2.min.js to the site.

That is it!

Download the cheat sheet from Ekin Ertac.

How to do A/B Testing with WordPress from Carsonified on Vimeo.

The importance of A/B testing really can’t be overstated enough, it is one of those things that you really don’t think has the type of effects that other people talk about until you try it yourself. And with tools like this making it stupidly easy to do this kind of testing there is really no excuse.