Affiliate Links

Suppose you are testing a product selling website and the site has affiliate links for products. From a tester point of view here I am explaining the cases to be considered while testing affiliate links. Before going to the cases, here I give a general idea about Affiliate links. Affiliate links means they are external links from a site that leads to services, merchants or vendors and it is mainly used for generating revenues for a site based on the clicks. Commonly seen Affiliate links are Ads displayed on a site and when a user clicks the ads the site gets revenue. Suppose your Drupal site displays a product say "books" and links to merchant sites like Amazon or eBay are displayed as affiliated links for that product. When user clicks on 'Amazon or eBay' links, it will be redirected to their corresponding merchant site and user can buy the product from that site. So when a user purchases a product using this affiliate link, our site will gets revenue from merchant sites.

In my previouds article "How to display Affiliate Links on page load for the contents using Category as reference id-Part 1?" I have provided a brief intrduction on affliate links and what all configurations we must do. In this article I will be explaining how to generate Affiliate Link on page load using hook_nodeapi().

Drupal 6 will not allow you to create multiple access callbacks for a menu. In hook menu, the access callback will accept only string value, not an array. But I had a requirement in my project to add a custom access callback without removing the existing access callback. My custom access callback should be executed first. After that if some condition satisfies in my custom function the original access callback should get executed.

Every one will be familiar with the template files.Now lets see the case to theme a block. Here we can use block.tpl.php for theming the block but what if we want to theme the block specifically by a region?In one of my recent projects I need to theme the block in a specific region, I cannot use block.tpl.php as this may cause all other blocks to change.While digging a bit deeper I found out that this can be done easily by using a template for that particular region.Let's see how it can be done so.

In this article I will be explaining What is Affiliate Links and what all configurations should be done to generate affiliate links on page load. Also will explain how to generate titles of required patterns using preg_match(). In a related article we have explained how to use hook_form_alter() to make the Multiple select field a single select.