What if....

[PFZ_Ken]

...I wanted to have a page on another server, another domain call and display a part on my listings site? What I mean is a page set up to display a category or sub-category or, something like "Latest listings". I guess I'd have to work out the formatting.

What would it take to do something like this?

Thanks,

Ken

[Mike-N-Tosh]

You could do it as an RSS feed which is already included with 68 Classifieds. The RSS Feed is generated by the external.php file. You access it from your other site as http://yourclassifiedssite/external.php. That is in both versions 3 & 4.

-Mike

[PFZ_Ken]

Ok, I pulled it up and it looks interesting. The file seems to be a "core" file therefor encrypted. I checked the admin cp and the manual, no mention of this. Is it configurable in any way?

I'd like to be able to pull up the "valves" category on one site, "pumps" on another. Is this possible with the RSS feed?

Thanks,

Ken

[Eric Barnes]

Here is a link that describes all the parameters you can use:
http://www.68classifieds.com/knowled...cle/rss-feeds/

[juven14]

Also, don't forget about iframes for the easiest methods, modern browsers handle them much better than the past.

[PFZ_Ken]

I played with the parameters and it works as expected. I guess RSS was designed for pulling in news headlines or so it seems.

What I'm trying to do here is to have a separate site, on a different server if necessary that can serve as a "funnel" to my main site featuring categories that fit the domain and other content on the site. I guess for this to work the so called funnel site must be SE friendly or pull in an SE friendly result. I know it would be a simple thing to create a site, add simple HTML content with links to wherever I want. But I'd like to have it where when I add a listing or other content it automatically will be pulled to the remote site from the main site.

So by adding one listing on my main site, I'm also adding a listing link to another site.

Make sense?

I'm sure this sort of thing has been thought of before but I'm not sure if it's doable in a worthwhile way.

Ken

[juven14]

Keep in mind if it is something you are distributing to people, you need to support a variety of formats. RSS definitely makes your stuff available in a standardized way, however some might not be able to figure out how to get, parse, and display that feed in a suitable way. There are some good php tools out there as well as javascript to display rss.

The easiest way would be to create an html iframe/frame and just point it to a page on your site. This wouldn't require them to have php sites or whatever, it would be straight html and all the formating would be controlled by you. Plus, you would also control the page behavior.

<iframe src="yoursite.com/yourfile.php" width="200" height="110"></iframe>

Just about every modern browser supports iframes, so using it shouldn't be a problem. Plus, you don't have to be a guru to add it to the site, anybody could copy/paste this. (I hope.)

[PFZ_Ken]

I tried this and it works well. I noticed that the frame pretty much shields what is in it from being displayed in the source code for the page. So it wouldn't provide any added benefit with regard to SEO but there's not much there in the feed to begin with, only what is in the "title" tag.

But it would have value in provide information visually with links back to the main site.

SEO could be addressed in other part of the page. I notice that in the source code only the "link", "title", "author" and "date" fields are pulled from the listing. If the short description could be pulled it could add some text to the source code that could be indexed. I haven't so far used the short description field, I just the larger description field.

Ken