Snagshout for Wordpress

The Snagshout WordPress plugin allows you to embed deals from the Snagshout syndication network, directly as a widget on your blog.

• Requirements
• Installation
  • Easy: Plugin directory
  • Advanced: Manual upload
• Configuration
• Usage: Adding widgets
• Development
• License

Requirements

• A recent version of WordPress (4.1 or higher).

• The server hosting WordPress should be running PHP 5.6 or higher.

• A Snagshout partner account.

• The date/time of the server hosting the blog should be correctly setup.

Installation

To use the install the plugin, you can either use the WordPress plugin directory or manually upload it into your WordPress install.

Easy: Plugin directory

1. Login into your blog's administration panel.

2. Go to Plugins >> Add New using the sidebar.

3. Search for the plugin by typing snagshout into the search field.

4. Click the Install Now button.

5. After WordPress has finished downloading the plugin, click Activate to enable the plugin.

Advanced: Manual upload

1. Go to the releases page and download the latest version of snagshout-wordpress.zip.

2. Login into your blog's administration panel.

3. Go to Plugins >> Add New using the sidebar.

4. Click Upload Plugin.

5. Use the file picker to locate and upload the snagshout-wordpress.zip file.

6. After WordPress has finished, unpacking the plugin, activate it by clicking Activate.

Configuration

After the plugin is activated, you will need to provide your partner account credentials. As a partner, you should have received a key pair consisting of a public ID and a secret key. These are used by the plugin to authenticate with the Snagshout platform and fetch deals.

Settings >> Snagshout:

In the settings panel, you can provide your public ID and secret key, and also set an optional affiliate ID to be included in all product links.

Usage: Adding widgets

Once the plugin is configured, you can proceed to begin adding Snagshout deals widgets into your site's sidebars and content areas.

NOTE: Widget areas are defined by the themed used by your site. Most themes include at least one sidebar, while some also include an area for widgets below posts and pages.

Appearance >> Widgets:

On the widgets admin panel, you can select "Snagshout Deals" and add it into a widget area. You can add as many widgets as you would like, with different configurations. Each widget's appearance and content can be customized through the provided options (Title, Layout, Category, Feed, etc).

After saving your changes, the Snagshout widget will be loaded into your site and begin displaying deals. If you provided an affiliate ID on the configuration panel, product links will include it automatically.

Development

Development of this plugin is done entirely using Docker containers. The plugin source is mounted directly into a WordPress container. This allows developers to easily try out the plugin across different WordPress versions.

Getting a developer environment mainly requires you to have Docker, a text editor, and following the next steps:

1. Install Docker and Docker Compose.

2. Run docker-compose up.

3. Go to http://localhost:8080 to setup your blog.

4. Login and enable the Snagshout plugin on the admin panel.

Once the plugin is enabled, any changes to the code on the local filesystem will be reflected in the container, so you can use any editor on your local system to modify the plugin.

Publishing

To generate a ZIP file for releasing the plugin, simply use make dist. This command will prepare a dist directory with the contents of the plugin and compress it into a ZIP file.

Additionally, WordPress uses SVN for hosting plugins in their directory. In order to update the plugin there, you'll need to clone the repository, and make changes to the copy on trunk and tag a release if needed:

svn co https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/snagshout remote
cd remote

# Make changes (use svn add and svn remove as needed)
# View status using: svn stat
# View diff using: svn diff

svn ci -m "Release. See github.com/sellerlabs/snagshout-wordpress."

When done, use make clean to restore the repository to its original state. This deletes the ZIP file, dist, and remote directories for you.

Tagging

When a new release is ready, maintainers can use bash scripts/tag.sh, which will prompt for the version number (X.X.X) and the continue to perform all the steps needed to publish and tag a new version of the plugin on both Git and SVN.

Changelog

The change log for this repository is automatically derived from commit messages, which follow the Angular commit convention. To update the change log, maintainers can use make changelog. It uses a Docker container which reads the commit history and overwrites the change log file, and the commits it.

make changelog

git push

License

This plugin is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. Please refer to the LICENSE file for more information.