Homepage featured products display

A popular request from the first version of Price Tapestry was for example code for showing product information on the site home page. The distribution now includes a simple "Featured Products" system that can be easily extended to create a content rich homepage to your Price Tapestry site.

MySQL Full Text indexing for effective product search

Price Tapestry can return product search results to your users even if they are not quite sure of the spelling, or when your database does not have a particular model. For example, if a user enters "Sony Plasma" in the search box; any products containing both words would appear at the top of the results; but the query would return other "Plasma" TVs besides Sony models. All the usual search result ordering methods are provided on product search result pages; including order by Relevance, Product Rating (if enabled) and price in ascending or descending order.

mod_rewrite support for clean URLs

Price Tapestry has the option to generate search engine friendly URLs to make your site easily crawlable and accurately indexed against the keywords associated with every product. In addition, by including appropriate keywords in the page URL and title, contextual advertising services (e.g. "Google AdSense") are able to serve well targeted ads to new pages that have not yet been indexed.

Searchable product category and brand indexes

The database has indexes created against product category and brand fields to enable both the generation of search engine friendly category and brand A-Z pages, and the facility to search within a category or brand by using a query such as "category:televisions".

Product rating and review

You can let your users generate content for you by using the product rating and review feature. This enables a rating of between 1 and 5 (taken as the average rating across all reviews) to be applied to each product; which can then be displayed along side product information on the featured products display, search results and main product page. This feature can be disabled if not required.

Bulk import products from any affiliate product datafeed

Price Tapestry includes the powerful Magic Parser library (written by the same author) to enable importing of products from just about any affiliate product feed file format, including all variants of CSV (comma, pipe, tab separated values etc.) and any custom XML vocabulary.

Simple filtering mechanism to modify data upon import (e.g. search and replace)

There may be situations in which you need to make changes to data during the import process. A common example is where the Buy URL in the product feed does not contain your affiliate URL and requires you to prefix the URL with a tracking link. Alternatively, you might need to perform a search and replace on the Buy URL to convert a placeholder into your affiliate ID.

Optional link jump script to enable click counting

By redirecting outbound links via a PHP script you can both hide your affiliate URLs from the end user, and also see how much traffic you have sent to each merchant on your website.

Category and Product grouping to match up product lines between merchants

It is common for slightly different variations of the same product and category names to be used by different merchants. For example, one merchant may use "Televisions", whilst another uses "TVs". Category and Product mapping lets you match up alternative category and product names to a single master category or product name of your choice. Screenshot shows category mapping page. Product mapping (added since this screenshot was taken) works in exactly the same way.

Append contents of additional fields to product description

Whilst almost all affiliate data feeds contain a description field, it is common for additional information such as a delivery charge to be provided in a separate field. Price Tapestry lets you pad out the description of each product using data from any other field in the product record, and you can use a prefix to describe the field if necessary.

Automatic Google Sitemap generation

The Google Sitemaps service enables webmasters to provide a database of URLs (using an XML vocabulary) for use by search engines to assist with the indexing of large sites. One major benefit of the Sitemaps service is the ability to include a "Last Modified" date against any URL in the sitemap, which may enable the search engine to allocate resources to a deeper crawl of your website.

Separation of Price Tapestry codebase from HTML generation code

Price Tapestry is very easy to customise, with a clear separation between the main PHP code and the PHP responsible for generating HTML. A subdirectory containing include files for each distinct visual element of the site means that you only need to make changes to one file to have the modifications incorporated into all pages that use that element. Screenshot shows the price table HTML code.