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After starting to deal with the issue of losing both my development laptop and my backup USB drive earlier in the summer, I sat down and started taking a hard look at all of the apps that I had been in various parts of development on. During this evaluation I decided to scrap all of my post plugins in order to combine them into a single platform working off of a single API.
So… With that said, I have scrapped development on all of the plugins that were in early stages of development. The only plugin that was nearing a release point was CafePost, my WordPress posting plugin that worked off of the CafePress API. I have taken all of my remaining notes and have started building a CafePress class for the myNicheShop plugin.
What is becoming of myNicheShop? Well, it is currently being developed in two parts.
The first part is an API server. This server compiles products used by our users into a single database. Currently the only merchant we have support for is CafePress. Eventually we plan to add other PoDs and merchant affiliate programs. Product records are built by accessing the merchant API and caching the product info into our database. I say caching because we will never display information that is more than a day old. If a record has a timestamp older than a day, the server will re-establish a connection with the merchant API and update our record before sending it to the affiliate site. In addition to serving data to affiliate applications, we also plan to eventually work in statistical reporting to the system, link masking, and some other goodies.
The second part is the actual affiliate applications. Currently we are developing the myNicheShop WordPress plugin. The plug-in allows affiliates to search through merchant APIs/datafeeds and select a product to create a post with. Posts can either be immediately posted, pre-dated, or post-dated. The functionality of the plug-in will be essentially the same as what we were working on with CafePost previously, except all communications will be with our API server.
We hope to have myNicheShop released to our testers by the end of the month. The initial release will include the CafePress class with an Amazon.com class following soon thereafter. Currently we have the following classes/support planned for definite inclusion:
Commission Junction API and LinkShare API
The following merchants are on the table for evaluation to see if support may easilly be added later:
Loxly Gallery datafeed, ImageKind RSS, Zazzle RSS, Share-a-sale datafeeds, Performics/Google Affiliate Network datafeeds.
Posted by 
admin on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 3:08 pm.
