Hot off the presses, figuratively speaking, it’s Affiliate Manger - Login for 5.x!

Like it’s 4.x predecessor, the Affiliate Manager - Login module provides an interface that Affiliate Manager affiliates can use to view and/or modify (that bit is optional) their personal and referral data including hits, orders, payouts paid, and payout’s due. The layout and content of the pages are entirely configurable from within the module’s admin; the outer portions of the Merchant pages are maintained by Merchant “page templates”; and the main content is configured by the module’s own “templates and token”. The best of both worlds in that you can control things like the navigation bar, category tree, outer table, etc. in the same manner that you do with stock Merchant but you can control the main contents of the page from within the module’s main admin with our more robust, module specific, tokens.

In Affiliate Manager, the affiliates themselves are tied to Merchant’s customer account feature (they have to have a customer account to become an affiliate) and the Affiliate Manager - Login module takes advantage of that by first requiring the affiliates to log in to their Merchant customer account before taking them to the module’s pages.

We’re getting slightly Web 2.0 lately. First the significantly more 2.0ish Product Flyout module and now Affiliate Manager - Login 5.x. This version has a “Stylesheet” tab which you can use to change the contents of a CSS stylesheet that is used for the module’s page (the same sylesheet is used for all of them). The contents of the tab are stored in a database field and when the tab is updated it is exported to a file, affiliatelogin.css. The .css file can of course be manually edited, just be careful not to over-write it by saving the Stylesheet tab in the module’s admin. The default pages don’t really do justice to what can be done with CSS though and for the most part it’s the very same table-based templates that were used in the 4.x module but now at least you have the option to modify it over to a full css layout (let me know if you go that route I would be interested in adding that option to the module’s default layouts). The only thing that uses the stylesheet is the css-based menu holding the links to the various pages.
As an aside, I think it’s safe to say that we have been generally slow (okay, I have been slow) to take up the newer web technologies like CSS and Ajax. Partially, it’s been the “nature of the beast”; we’re riding on Merchant’s coat-tails so to speak and Merchant is decidedly NOT taking advantage of the newer technologies (thankfully that will be changing in the upcoming Merchant 5.5). And a lot of the reason is that the technology, CSS particularly, are “design elements” to me and only peripheral to the module itself. As you can tell my the aesthetics of my modules, I’m a programmer, not a designer. Fortunately, that too is changing though and we will be releasing new modules soon which will carry Merchant headlong into the future…or at least the present.

Now that the upgrade of Affiliate Manager - Login is out of the way next up on my agenda is to finish adding the product specific payout features of Affiliate Manager 5.x (which will permit you to configure specific payouts for each product specific to each affiliate). I have received some great suggestions here and I think I’ll likely just keep it relatively simple.