Smarty

[mitchenall]

www.trackitdown.net - the Dance Music MP3 Distribution Centre, just launched and is uses Smarty for nearly all the HTML rendering.
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Mark Mitchenall

[mitchenall]

I just figured I'd post something about the affiliate system which I just plugged into trackitdown.net. This allows them to create lots of different affiliate stores, each branded to the recordlabel, artist or community site which the store is for.

Each affiliate can customise the basic colour scheme and text used on their store by modifying a simple conf file (a Smarty config file). Or they can upload a new stylesheet, graphics, and also replace the standard header, footer and navigation templates.

The affiliate sites use exactly the same code as the main trackitdown.net site, however they use a different set of templates with one or two slight differences over the main site templates. Obviously, there quite a few other changes under the hood, but the code base is the same, with just a few things working differently for affiliate sites.

This is where using a template engine for the presentation layer really pays for itself, and the additional tools in Smarty helped me build the new affiliate store templates fairly quickly. Plus the additional of config files makes it really easy for an affiliate to localize their store, or replace some text links with graphic buttons, etc.

In the page_start.php script which everything calls, we determine which site we're looking at and set our template path to the correct path for either the main site or affiliate site. Other than that, the code execution is the same between the affiliate sites and the main site.

Here's a few examples of what can be done... none took longer than an hour to put together using the HTML and graphics from the original sites...

http://www.trackitdown.net/ (original site)
http://mixmag.trackitdown.net/
http://inthemix.trackitdown.net/
http://di.trackitdown.net/
http://biggie.trackitdown.net/
http://elpmedien.trackitdown.net/
http://recoverworld.trackitdown.net/
http://uktrancealliance.trackitdown.net/

Cheers

Mark
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Mark Mitchenall

[rowan_gurn]

Thats so funny, we have your shop on our site and we use smarty too

http://www.gurn.net

http://gurn.trackitdown.net