Affiliate Manager 5.x “design settings” and more news on what’s coming next

Affiliate Manager 5.x (our MivaMerchant module for affiliate tracking, for those who stumble in here out of the dark) has been undergoing some significant development lately. Among other things, the admin has been updated to use our new css layout to brighten your Miva Merchant experience; the default grey, dark-red, and black of Merchant Admin starts to get to me after a while.

Two weeks ago I finished adding the product specific payouts feature that lets you configure each affiliate to be paid a specific amount for individual products. And along those lines, you can configure it a “category at a time” so that all of a cateory’s products have the same affiliate payouts.

Last week I added the option to send “New Affiliate” notification emails up the referral chain so that you can notify affiliates when someone they have referred signs up to become affiliates themselves.

And today I have just completed adding the ability to configure specific global headers and footers for each affiliate. These can be used in place of the default header and footers whenever customers shop in the store as a result of a referral from that affiliate.

You’ll find specific entries addressing all of these new features in the module’s FAQ.

I decided to not make the “Affiliate Design” (affiliate specific store design elements like fonts, colors, etc.) feature a separate module and instead have incorporated it into the Affiliate Manager. Right now it just includes the aforementioned global header and footer but will soon include many more of the usual store settings.

And in other news, as Merchant 5.x search modules seem to be all of the rage these days it’s no surprise that we have started on one of our own. It’s currently under pretty rapid development carrying the code name “Focus’” (okay, that’s also quite likely the final name). To be worth while against the competition, which also seems to have an impressive array of features, the new search module will be much more robust than the Merchant 4.x Search Manager and less expensive than the other options out there (and you get the slick new admin layout for free!). It uses Ferret, the Ruby port of the Lucene search library and will provide for a handy set of features. In addition to the Search Manager feature set it will provide the ability to recommend alternative spellings, the option to “filter” the search results, the ability to weight certain search fields (and products), and much more. Ultimately, it will have the ability to index and search the entire site and hae those results displayed in the store. Although some advanced features, like that one, will likely have to wait until after the initial release…one thing about a VikingCoder’s module, it’s always under development. I’ll post more on Focus as it’s development proceeds.