Only one shortcode for the whole site?

Hi Olaf,

Thanks for your question. Yes it is possible to have more than one shortcode for the plugin per page – actually you can have as many as you like.

When you set up your Auction Affiliate options on the edit page/post screen and then add the shortcode, these options are used to determine which items are displayed. If you want to display more than one set of items on the same page, you can add a second shortcode and within it specify which setting you would like to overload. All other settings will be the same, except from the ones you explicitly overload.

For example, say you want to display two sets of items – one showing six iPhones and one showing three iPads. If you want all other settings to be the same (i.e. the eBay site, your ePN custom ID, the theme etc) then you can set up the common options in the Auction Affiliate options box and then specifying two different shortcodes like so:

[auction-affiliate eKeyword="iPhone" eCount="6"]

[auction-affiliate eKeyword="iPad" eCount="3"]

You can also use this method for showing items from within your theme, by using the WordPress do_shortcode() function like so:

<?php echo do_shortcode('[auction-affiliate eKeyword="iPad" eSite="0" eCount="4"]'); ?>

There is a little more information about this feature on the Auction Affiliate site, which is something I intent to expand on:

http://www.auctionaffiliate.co/docs/clients/wordpress

Also the full documentation on the available options is available here:

http://www.auctionaffiliate.co/docs/parameters

In answer to your second question, yes all interaction with the eBay servers and heavy lifting is handled by the Auction Affiliate server. In the last few weeks I have added some additional caching features to the WordPress plugin so items load faster than ever.

If you have any questions once you start using the plugin then please do not hesitate to get in touch.

All the best,

Joe

Hi Olaf,

Thanks for your input – I will be sure to update the documentation to make more of this feature.

A valid point. The Auction Affiliate server has excellent uptime, but things can happen to any online service. There are pros and cons to both centralized and decentralized approaches. At the moment the WordPress plugin is just one of three Auction Affiliate clients (Javascript, PHP and WordPress) and for now the pros of a centralized approach outweigh the cons (some of which I discussed here: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/why-does-it-use-your-server)

That said, this is something I am considering for the future.

Thanks again for your comments,

Joe