PhpBay Pro – The Extended Manual “Get The Most Out Of phpBay Pro For Wordpress” This guide provides installation and configuration instructions for phpBay Pro for Wordpress. It also explains how to setup geo-targeting, and discusses a few other simple tweaks to get the best out of this money-making plugin, including image linking and modifying the Wordpress search results to show auction listings.
Assumptions This guide assumes that you know what phpBay is, that you have a license for it, that you have an account with eBay Partner Network and that you have the latest version of Wordpress installed. If not... 1) Learn about phpBay here. 2) Use this link to buy phpBay and when prompted for a discount code, use: DA9CD69F42 to get 20% off. 3) Sign up with eBay Partner Network here. 4) Use the Wordpress auto-install on your host if available or try the 5-minute install instructions here. You may also want to check out this 9 step guide if you would like to start from the ground up.
Table Of Contents 1) Installation/Activation 2) Configuration 3) Testing 4) phpBay Per-Post and Per-Page Settings 5) Geo-Targeting 6) Making the Images Clickable 7) Replacing Wordpress Search with eBay Search 8) Becoming a Niche Website Expert
Installation/Activation The first step is to install the plugin. It installs just about like any other plugin for Wordpress, but there are a few extra files. Fristly... 1) 2)
Download the plugin to your desktop Unzip it (free unzipper: WinRAR)
After unzipping the package you will see: 1) an 'images' folder 2) a 'wp-content' folder 3) an 'auction.php' file 4) the instruction manual and a troubleshooting text file Upload/FTP Steps (free FTP'er: FileZilla) 1) Upload all the images from the 'images' folder to the 'images' folder in the root of your blog. If you don't have
an 'images' folder in the root, just upload the entire folder. 2) Upload the 'auction.php' file to the root of your blog. 3) Upload the entire 'phpBay' folder that is inside of the 'wp-content/plugins/' folder, to the '/wp-content/plugins/' folder of your blog. Now, login to your Wordpress Control Panel, click 'Plugins' from the left menu, and Activate 'phpBay Pro Plugin for Wordpress'. Now, phpBay is installed and activated! Good job! Now onto configuration...
Configuration Setting Up A Campaign On eBay Partner Network: Setting up a unique campaign per site rather than using the default is a good idea because you will be able to track the sites that are making you sales and how much. 1) Click 'Campaigns' from the top menu. 2) Click 'Create Campaign' from the secondary menu. 3) Enter a Campaign name and click 'Create'. 4) Make note of the newly created 'Campaign ID'. Configuring phpBay: Go to Settings > phpBay Pro 1) Enter your license number in the top box and click 'Update Options'.
2) In the 'Affiliate Settings' section enter the Campaign ID that you just created, and in the 'Custom ID' box, enter the name you gave the Campaign. Click 'Update Options'. The rest of the options are a matter of preference but I will go through the settings that I usually choose. 1) Choose the country that you are targeting mainly. This setting won't matter much later because we will be setting up geo-targeting and the country will automatically be selected based on your visitors location. 2) Under the 'Basic Options' I always turn on the following: 'Use SEO URLs', 'Display Items with Images Only', 'Use mod_rewrite on eBay Images'. 3) Under the 'Visual Display Options' I always turn on the following: 'Display the eBay Logo?', 'Create Clean Product Titles?', 'Display Sort Options?'. You can turn on 'Display Listings in Columns?' if
you want. I do sometimes. Most themes usually fit 3 columns. If the theme won't fit 3 columns, you may want to turn off the eBay logo and the sort options too because they likely won't fit either. You'd have to test it to be sure. 4) Under the 'Advanced Options' I always select 'Time: ending soonest' from the 'Select Sort Order:' drop down box. This setting won't matter if you didn't turn on 'Display Sort Options?' under the 'Visual Display Options' though. This is also the section where you can turn on 'paging' and set the max number of listings if you wish, but those values can be overridden on a per-page/per-post level. 5) Don't forget to change the URL to your affiliate URL in the 'Enter your affiliate link:' box, under 'phpBay Pro Affiliate Settings', or just remove the text altogether. 6) Click any of the 'Update Options' buttons and go through to make sure all your settings have been saved correctly.
If you turned on either 'Use SEO URLs' or 'Use mod_rewrite on eBay Images' under the 'Basic Options' as suggested, after saving your settings, you will see a box at the top called '.htaccess Code'. That code will need to be copied and pasted into your .htaccess file. Use the steps below: 1) Click inside the textbox and the code should all be highlighted. Right-click and click 'Copy' to get the code to the clipboard. 2) Go back to FileZilla. Go to the root of your Wordpress install. You should see a .htacess file near the top. Download it to your desktop. If it's not there, press F5. If it's still not there, it may not have been created yet. A quick way to create it is to change your permalinks. You probably should change them anyways. Go to Settings > Permalinks and change the 'Custom Structure' to something like: /%category%/%postname%/ OR
/%postname%/ and click 'Save Changes'. Now go Refresh (F5) FileZilla and download the .htaccess file. 3) Open the file in a text editor. Be careful, some text editors jumble this file and therefore screw it up when re-saved. I use TextPad which displays/saves it correctly. 4) The code from the phpBay Settings page should be still on your clipboard. If not, go back and grab it and paste it (right-click > paste) at the very top of the .htaccess file and Save it. 5) Upload the .htaccess file back to your server and overwrite the existing one. phpBay is now configured and ready to be dropped into posts and pages. Next we'll test it out...
Testing Let's make a sample page (it doesn't have to be published) with some auctions so that we can see the progress of the changes that we make when doing the upgrades (geotargeting and image linking). Just add a new page like you normally would... 1) Under 'Pages', click 'Add New'. 2) Add a Title. 3) Click the 'HTML' tab on the editor. 4) Click the 'phpBay' button that shows up in the editor. You should now see the following code: [phpbay]keyword(s), num, "", ""[/phpbay]
5) Erase everything between the [phpbay] tags so that you have: [phpbay][/phpbay]
6) Insert a search term between the tags...use a term that you might use when searching eBay for the auctions that you want to display. Then put a comma and the number of auctions you want to display. Example: [phpbay]bass fishing lures,5[/phpbay]
7) 8)
Click 'Save Draft'. Click 'Preview'.
Now you have a basic working example of eBay auction listings for the country that was set in the phpBay global settings. You can manually switch to display different countries' auctions if you like. I will explain shortly how to do it automatically. In the next step I will go through some of the settings that you can specify at this level.
phpBay Per-Post and Per-Page Settings There are a number of settings that you can specify on a per-post or per-page level. I will go over some popular ones. The phpBay manual can be referenced for more details. There are 18 total parameters that can be set, with the only required one being the 'search term' which is the first parameter. phpBay will check the global settings for the settings to use for any unused parameters. All parameters are separated by commas and have to be used in the proper order, but again, not all values have to be set. In the previous example we used just 2 of them. The 1st parameter as we know, is the search term. If you want to add multiple terms, just separate them with the pipe symbol “|� (above the Enter key usually). For example:
[phpbay]bass fishing lures|large mouth fishing lures,5[/phpbay]
The 2nd parameter is the number of auctions to display. The 3rd parameter is the eBay Category ID. This is a great way to add different pages to your site broken down by catgeory. Also, for example, if you want to search for 'jewelry' but only Wholesale Lots, you would need to add a category ID, otherwise you will get results from multiple categories. Click here for the US Category list and their corresponding ID's. Don't worry, the correct results will still show up when looking at other countries auctions. Here's an example for 'jewelry' auctions in the 'Wholesale Lots' category. I will leave out the number of auctions (2nd parameter), to show you how to skip parameters that you do not want to use: [phpbay]jewelry|jewellery,,40131[/phpbay]
The 4th parameter is for exclusion keywords. Add words separated by spaces, as a way to filter out some auctions that show up in your results that don't belong or that you do not want. Another parameter I like to use is the 12th one. It is used to specify a Custom ID on the page (or post) level. That way you can fine tune your tracking. Now, in addition to tracking at the site level, you can now track at the page/post level. If you turned on 'paging' in the global settings, and you specify a value in parameter 2 (number of listings to show), then you will need to turn off paging for this page/post. To do that, set the 17th parameter to a 0 (just the number zero). Let's setup geo-targeting now...
Geo-Targeting There is a free plugin available that will automatically display auctions for the country of your visitor when they arrive on your site. The plugin was created by Alan (a phpBay Pro user) and is available free (donationware) from his blog after opting-in to his newsletter. Let's get the plugin now... 1) Visit http://www.psptubes.net/wordpress/phpbay-plugin 2) Scroll to the very bottom because it is mostly an out-dated post. 3) Enter your name and email and click 'Send me the plugin'. You may be brought to a page that says 'Whoops! That Page Isn't Here'. Don't worry, there is just something funky going on with his subscription pages. Perhaps he should switch to Aweber ;) At any rate, you should quickly get an email with the
Subject: 'ACTION REQUIRED: Confirm your subscription.'. Click the link in the email to confirm your subscription. You will again probably be brought to a page that says 'Whoops! That Page Isn't Here'. Again, don't worry. You should be receiving another email shortly with the link for the plugin. 4) Open the email with the Subject: 'phpBay plugin download details'. 5) Click the 2nd link in the email to download the plugin. Now that we have the plugin, let's get it installed... 1) Unzip the file 2) Upload 'geo.php', 'combo.php', 'country.php' and 'geoip.inc' to '/wpcontent/plugins/phpBay/includes/' on your server. Note: You will be overwriting 2 files, 'geo.php' and 'combo.php', so you may want to backup the ones on the server first. Renaming them on the sever before uploading the new ones will work.
3) Download the free database file from maxmind.com. Click here. Under the 'Binary Format' section, click the link 'Download the latest GeoLite Country Binary Format' to save the database to your computer. It will be compressed in .gz format. The free tool WinRAR can decompress the file, much like unzipping a file. 4) You will be left with a file called 'GeoIP.dat'. It needs to be uploaded to '/wp-content/plugins/phpBay/includes/' in Binary mode. If using FileZilla to upload, go to Transfer > Transfer type > Binary. You can check maxmind.com for a new version each month. I, myself, just update it every 6 months. When updating, just overwrite the existing file on the server. That should do it! To be certain it works, switch the default country in the phpBay settings to one other than your own temporarily. Make sure the sorting options or the eBay logo is displayed (discussed
earlier) because having one or both of those turned on will also turn on the country dropdown box. Now visit the test page that you created earlier. You should be now viewing auctions in your own country rather than the default country. If you still see the default country it might be because the page is cached. If using Firefox you can usually press Ctrl+F5 to fix that. Notice something about the auctions? The darn images aren't clickable. Let's fix that now...
Making the Images Clickable To make the images in your auction listings clickable you just have to make a quick change to one or two of the template files that phpBay provides. There is one file to change if you use columns and another file to change if you don't. It doesn't hurt to change them both. Here's how... 1) Download the files 'template.ebay.results.html' and 'template.column.results.html' located in the '/wpcontent/plugins/phpBay/templates/' folder, to your computer. 2) Open 'template.ebay.results.html' with a text editor. If using TextPad, rightclick it and click TextPad and it will open with TextPad. If you double clicked it, it
will likely just open in a browser and you won't be able to edit it, so you will want to open it like mentioned. 3) Locate the line with the code: <td width="100" align="left"><img src="% %image%%" alt="%%alt_title%%" border="0" /></td>
and change it to: <td width="100" align="left"><a href="% %link_url%%" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"><img src="%%image%%" alt="% %alt_title%%" border="0" /></a></td>
The red represents what is changed in that line. 4) Save the file and re-upload, overwriting the existing file. 5) Now open 'template.column.results.html' with a text editor. 6) Locate the line with the code: <img src="%%image%%" alt="%%alt_title%%" border="0" /><br />
and change it to: <a href="%%link_url%%" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"><img src="%%image%%" alt="% %alt_title%%" border="0" /></a><br />
Again, the red represents what is changed in that line. 7) Go back to your test page and Refresh (F5) it to see your changes. You now have clickable images in your listings! Good job! Now, optionally, you may want to replace the Wordpress search with a phpBay search...
Replacing Wordpress Search With eBay Search You may want to replace the Wordpress search function to show eBay listings rather than regular search results for the sites existing content. To do this you just have to replace some text in your theme's search.php file. Note: This doesn't work for all themes, so be sure to do a backup in case it doesn't work for you. Here are the steps... 1) Go to your theme folder with your FTP program (FileZilla). The theme folder will be located here: '/wp-content/themes/ {theme name}/' where {theme name} is the name of your theme of course :) 2) We want to edit the search.php file but we should make a quick backup first. One way is to download the file to your
computer. Rename it. Upload it again. Now you have a backup on the server in case you need to fall back to it. 3) Go to your Theme Editor (Appearance > Editor) in your Wordpress Control Panel. 4) Open the file 'Search Results â&#x20AC;&#x201C; search.php' from the right side. 5) Locate the line: <?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
and then scroll down near the bottom and look for: <?php endif; ?>
You will need to remove all the code between and including those 2 lines and replace it with: <p style="text-align:center;">Your search for '<strong><? echo $_GET["s"] ?></strong>' returned the following results:</p> <p> <?php
function phpBaySearch($term) { $keyword = $term; $category = ""; $text .= '[phpbay]' . $keyword . ',20,' . $category . ', ""[/phpbay]'; echo phpBayPro($text); } phpBaySearch($_GET["s"]); ?> </p>
6) Click 'Update File'. 7) Go test the search function on your site. You should see a list of auctions as the result of a search. If not, and you get errors, check back through the code. Worse case scenario you can just restore your backup search file. To do that, go to your theme folder in your FTP software. Delete the file search.php. Locate your backup file (the one you renamed earlier) and rename it back to search.php. You can rename it right on the server. Just right-click and click 'Rename'. Well, there you have it. Hope you found this guide helpful. You may want to download the phpBay folder from the 'plugins' folder
and use that for all new installs so you don't have to repeat these steps for every site that you build. Now, if you want to bring your niche website building to a whole new level, you may find the following quite handy...
Becoming a Niche Website Expert If you would like to fine tune your knowledge even more, definitely check out the 9 Step Guide. It covers... 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7)
Picking A Market Planning Your Website Creating Your Content Building Your Website Marketing Your Website Managing Your Website And More!
Click Here For The 9 Step Guide Which Is Being Dubbed â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Number 1 Way To Make Money Onlineâ&#x20AC;?. Thanks for reading this guide. Feel free to send it off to some friends and/or add it your website or blog.
Keith Lock http://keithjameslock.com