David Fiske Affiliate Marketing & Web Development

Back in early January, Joost posted details of a Wordpress related competition - design and build a theme or plugin that extends upon sunPress, the Sunshine.co.uk affiliates plugin. The prize was a Macbook Air or cash alternative.

Breaking with my recently set New Years resolution, I delved into the world of WordPress. I've got a couple of sites running the script so I know the ins and outs of running it. I've designed the templates for the sites so know how that works. Plugins was an area I've never delved into.
 
I decided early on that a plugin was better than a theme. A couple of really nice themes already exist for SunPress (my favourite is "Basic Theme"). As for plugins, there's a couple of areas I explored:

• Using the Sunshine.co.uk RSS feeds somehow
• Listing other travel agents alongside the Sunshine.co.uk offering somehow

The first seemed more logical and straightforward. On it's own, parsing RSS feeds is nothing special. I needed to look a little bit outside the box. A quick search of the web and I discovered there's quite a few affiliates from outside the UK. A new concept was born.

The brief: Create a plugin that parses Sunshine RSS feeds. Extend upon this by converting the prices into Euros or US Dollars whilst leaving an option for UK affiliates to use it as a straight forward RSS parser.

I spent a week developing the plugin into a nicely rounded package. I submitted it and forgot about it. A week ago, I was contacted by Chris Clarkson. In line with his comment on Joost's blog, he picked me as one of the finalists. I refined the plugin somewhat and waited.

Meanwhilst, I uploaded it to WordPress and created a page all about the SunPress Exchange plugin.

Anyhoo, Joost and Chris have since judged the competition and have awarded me the prize of best entry in the competition! So many thanks to them. I've opted for Amazon vouchers and am eyeing up books on Wordpress plugin development ;-)

About My Plugin

The official blurb goes like this:

My original idea was to create a widget to parse Sunshine RSS feeds. A simple idea but nothing special. After searching the web, I noticed an interest in SunPress from overseas affiliates. I refined this idea to not only parse RSS feeds but to convert the currencies into Euros or US Dollars. The result is an RSS parsing plugin that can display accurate and up-to-date prices in British Pounds, Euros and US Dollars. Any Sunshine RSS feed can be used and each blog post can have a different feed specified, each displayed in a sexy looking box underneath each post.

The plugin has been specifically designed to work with sunPress but can work as a standalone plugin - so if you are promoting Sunshine via a normal Wordpress blog, you can use it too.

The (sexy) front end looks like this:



This box can be completely customised by changing the built-in CSS file. If orange isn't your thing or the border should be dotted, you can change that. If you don't want the Sunshine background, you can change that too.

More information can be found at http://www.davidfiske.co.uk/wordpress-sunpress-exchange.html along with the download link. I haven't quite figured out how to support the plugin but I'm quite happy for questions to be be posted here as comments.

The readme.txt file contains detailed instructions.