Website Help

0james0

I have asked in various forums around the web, but have either been ignored or not helped. So back to my roots, thought I'd test the knowledge of the best forum on the web!

I have a small affiliate website and this is what I want to do:

I want to be able to display products from some of the companies I'm working with. E.g- Dixons, top 5 best sellers. Ideally I'd like this to update itself, like the banners I have do (they change with offers, promotions etc)

The problem I have is two fold, firstly I used moonfruit to make my site (it looks great, but implementing certain things is very tricky) and secondly and prob the biggest restriction, I don't know what I'm doing!

The affiliate networks I use provide product feeds for me in XML or CSV and other types, but I don't know how to get this info onto my site.

So far the only way I know how is to take each individual product and using the banners the networks provide as a template, I've deleted the banner url's and pic url's and replaced them with those from the product I wanted. The problem with this is it is time consuming as I need to do things individually and I'm not sure if they even auto update.

Any help anyone can give would be very appreciated.

Also, if anyone wants to check out my website and give me suggestions you can visit it at: www.magic-offers.co.uk (links work, it's fully functioanl, but website still really in beta stage) Bear in mind I've winged the whole thing and learnt it as I go!

RobTang

I think the easiest way is to have an iframe on your site, then use a xlst file to transform the xml file you receive inside the iframe. (or just re-do your site as a xlst file)
(depending on the content in the xml file)
While I admit this doesn't sound easy at all, it doesn't need any scripting language knowledge or backend support

0james0

RobTang wrote: »

I think the easiest way is to have an iframe on your site, then use a xlst file to transform the xml file you receive inside the iframe. (or just re-do your site as a xlst file)
(depending on the content in the xml file)
While I admit this doesn't sound easy at all, it doesn't need any scripting language knowledge or backend support

You make it sound so easy!

Do you know if I could implement an iframe into moonfruit? -it's java based, but has the option to insert a HTML block (thats how my banners are there)

RobTang

as long as you can add this http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/tag_iframe.asp iframe tag somwhere to your page, it should be ok, you can use its style options to get rid of the borders, set size etc so it looks like a bit of your page not a frame. then just point it to your .xlst file.

then you just have to knock out the xlst file http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/.
Its basicly transforms an xml file into a html file browsers can use, so you can display the information from the feed as you wish on your site.

If you are using java tho, you could just parse the xml file and then output as you see fit on your page