Earn A Living Online » ebay listings

phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Replacing WordPress Search

Keith Lock — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:30:16 +0000

We’ve come a long way in the extended manual for phpBay, but there’s still a lot of good stuff coming up. We’ve already covered what I think are the basics, features that I believe should be part of the core. We got into phpBay geo ip targeting and of course making the images link over to the auctions as well.

Today I want to cover converting the WordPress search to a search which shows eBay results using phpBay instead. It’s not something you would want to do on all of your sites though. For example, on this blog, I still want people to find post content when doing a search, although I still use phpBay on some of the pages of this blog. This change is more for sites that are strictly designed as eBay stores. Also if you use the Search2Post plugin from psp-tubes.net, then you will already have a plugin that performs this task, and then some. In addition to showing eBay results, Search2Post also creates a post on-the-fly with the search results. That way, new content is created over time. Anyway, let’s get into it…

Table Of Contents

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…

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 :)
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.
Go to your Theme Editor (Appearance > Editor) in your WordPress Control Panel.
Open the file ‘Search Results – search.php’ from the right side.
Locate the line:

and then scroll down near the bottom and look for:

You will need to remove all the code between (and including) those 2 lines and replace it with:

Click here to get this code in a text file.
Click ‘Update File’.
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’.

That should do it. The next step is going to cover keyword tracking for SEO. In other words, you could see which keywords are used in the search engines to find your auctions, and that ultimately end in a sale. This upgrade is also FREE!

Any questions, please post below.

More info: phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Replacing WordPress Search

phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Making The Images Clickable

Keith Lock — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:50:29 +0000

Continuing on with the phpBay Extended Manual… In this post I will explain how to make the images clickable (linking to the auction) in your phpBay eBay listings. If you are a bit more advanced and just want the answer: locate the html template files and edit the html adding in the proper tokens. If you need more help, please read on.

BTW, did you notice that I added a couple extra sections to the manual? I will also be covering SEO and PPC keyword tracking. Also, I will explain how to add phpBay code into your themes and give an example of when that might be useful. Those sections will be up in a few days. So far, I have had the luxury of having these posts pre-written because they exist already in a PDF manual I wrote. The new ones however have to be done from scratch, plus added to the PDF. I shouldn’t be delayed too long, if at all, I still want to try and get a post a day out to you. Anyway read on for the steps…

Table Of Contents

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 in case you switch between a single column and multiple columns on occasion. Here’s how…

Download the files ‘template.ebay.results.html’ and ‘template.column.results.html’ located in the ‘/wp-content/plugins/phpBay/templates/’ folder, to your computer.
Open ‘template.ebay.results.html’ with a text editor. If using TextPad, right-click 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.
Locate the line with the code: (it’s all on one line, it’s just wrapped in the image below)

and change it to: (again, it’s wrapped)
Save the file and re-upload, overwriting the existing file.
Now open ‘template.column.results.html’ with a text editor.
Locate the line with the code:

and change it to: (wrapped code below)
Go back to your test page and Refresh (F5) it to see your changes.

Next we’ll replace the WordPress search with a search that displays phpBay results instead.

More info: phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Making The Images Clickable

phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Parameter Settings

Keith Lock — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:41:51 +0000

Today in the phpBay Pro Extended Manual, we will cover some of the more important settings that can be set on the page or post level. I have already covered installation and configuration and explained how to add phpBay code, and therefore, eBay listings, into a page. You can use the Table of Contents below if you want to read from the beginning.

Table Of Contents

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:

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:

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).

Next I will get into setting up geo-targeting for phpBay which is a free upgrade that will automatically show auction listings specific to the visitors country.

More info: phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Parameter Settings