Magento, as many of you are by now aware, is an incredibly powerful e-commerce platform if not a bit frustrating. Lately we have been building our fair share of Magento sites. Many of our clients are using AvantLink for their affiliate marketing programs. In our opinion, the guys at Avantlink run one of the best affiliate management programs out there. Because of the quality of their affiliates, there are gonna be times when, as an Avantlink Merchant, you’ll need to hide links from the affiliate traffic.

In one case, our client, Marine Products has a link to their Ski Boat listings in the main navigation menu. Since boats are not part of their affiliate program, AvantLink affiliates will consider this a bleed off and will not send traffic to Marine Products.

The fix for this is really simple:

Go to Admin>System>Configuration>Design

In the Design Panel You have the option of  Placing Content in “Miscellaneous HTML”

Place the following code snippet in the input box, making sure to replace the info “XXX” with your account number and our style descriptors with your own.

<script type="text/javascript">
var avad = avant_get_cookie('avant_XXX');
if (avad != null)
{jQuery(".sidebar_callout_mercury").css("display","none");
jQuery(".nav-boats").css("display","none");
jQuery(".boats_home").css("display","none");}
</script>

Note, you will need to make sure that you have the AvantLink Tracking Script installed (”avant_sfpc_XXX.js”). Again XXX should contain your account number.

If you have any questions or need assistance with any Magento or Avantlink integration, please contact us.

Recently, we have added Wordpress to our arsenal of publishing tools. A few weeks back we finished a heavily modified WordPress install turned deal-of-the-day website with CMS features. For the cart functionality, we used a popular cart installation from Instinct. This small shop out of New Zealand has created a nice little plugin that has gained much popularity in the WP community.

One of the tweaks that we made was to enable the storeowner to easily change the product that was displayed on the front page each day. Rather than write an entirely new function we used the existing widget functionality of WP and changed two lines of code to enable easy publishing of the item to the front page. This enabled our client to upload an entire month products and simply change one setting to display the product each day. Read more »

Hello World is a common phrase used by programmers when first learning new types of code or when developing the first pages of a web site. Assembling code and websites can involve substantial amounts of work. For this reason, this simple statement is used to test efficacy of the work.

As we launch our new incarnation of the Flint website, I thought it appropriate begin our blog with our very own ‘Hello World’.

As we move into the future our posts on this page will include tricks and tips for a variety subjects within our discipline. Additionally we will post our musings thought and other sundry topics. We invite you to check back often.