Announcing RSS feeds for Cafewish Categories Scripts
We're very excited to announce a new feature for shops using our Cafewish Categories Script - RSS feeds of your shop sections!
See a preview on our demo store at http://www.cafepress.com/cafewish/2492125
How to get it in your shop? Pretty simple, actually. If you have the categories script installed, you have two options for your rss button. You can place it at the top of your product section, which will show up to the right of your menu table as shown in the demo link above. You can also place it at the bottom of your product section, which can be aligned left, right or center.
1) Top right of the section
If you want the rss button to show up on the upper right of your menu table like in the demo, simply insert the following text
var cw_showRSS = true;
in your head tag section (Not your "Header" section) along with your other cafewish variables (like var isScriptedPage=false;). Save that page. Done.
2) Bottom of the section (left, right or center)
If you want it at the bottom instead - or also - do this. Look in the "Footer" section of your Custom HTML page for
if (isScriptedPage){
Now look below that and there should be two lines like this:
document.write ('</td></tr></table>');
document.write (' </td></tr></table>');
On the next line, add the following code:
document.write ('<div style="text-align:center;"><a target="top" href="' + rssurl + '">');
document.write ('<img border="0" width="25" height="25" src="http://www.cafewish.com/rss/rss.gif" /><br />get rss</a></div>');
If you'd like it right or left instead of center, just change that in the style.
So what can you do with an rss feed? Well, lots of things. Mainly, it is a standard product feed that allows you or someone else easy access to your products. Other developers may come along and build tools that can utilize this feed. I have plans to incorporate it into some wordpress plugins, for example. Someone could build a simply add-on to the Cafewish script that can make it easy for affiliates to affiliate this store section based on the feed.
And no, it's not limited to use inside your shops. You can use the rss feed hardcoded anywhere you like. Just open the feed to see the rss link. It looks very similar to the categories script link you already use in your wish'd shop.
The current version is fairly standard. I'll be adding some other options in the future. Let me know if you have any questions, suggestions, run into problems, etc.
Yes, this is available for all CafeWish Categories Script accounts!
Credit: This idea popped into my head one night after working on some Wordpress plugins for our Wishads scripts. It seemed a little daunting because though I work with xml feeds, the nuances of RSS feeds had escaped me. Knowing this would be a welcome benefit for my CCS users, I went back to one of my CafePress/POD mentors, Adam O'Connor of buy-tees.com. Adam is a great tester of my products and developer of his own like instantCafe. He had tried in vain to help me with rss formatting before to no avail. The student simply wasn't ready. But armed with a new determination, I persisted. And with as much patience as a Brit can muster, he got through it one more time. Success! Thank you very much, Adam.
