Friday, January 28, 2011

Tutorial: Personalize Your ArtFire Collection Widget

The ArtFire Collection Widget is a great tool for embedding a collection on your web-site.

Have you ever noticed the link in the center of the Collection widget footer? If you click on the link, it returns a search of ArtFire items with that tag. Wouldn't it be great if you could relate that search to your Collection theme? Well, you can.

This example reads "Handmade Gifts" and clicking the link will take you to an ArtFire search for "Gifts".







But this collection happened to be a Texas ArtFire Guild collection and I prefer to have the link bring up a search of Texas ArtFire Guild Members items.

Instead of pasting the code directly to my blog post I paste it first to a NotePad document. Don't try to use a Word document because it will really mess things up.

This is what the last line of the original code for my collection widget looks like:





This is another example of what the last line of your widget code could look like:





All I need to do is replace the original search information: modules.php?name=gift_hub
with the search term I want to use which is:
texasartfire.

I also want to change the link title to display "More Selections from Texas ArtFire Guild". So I need to replace the words:
Handmade Gifts
with
More Selections from Texas ArtFire Guild

This is what the code looks like after I made my corrections:





And this is what the footer of the collection looks like.


If you want to see the link in action, check out my blog post "God Blessed Texas Collection".

I have several tutorials on my blog. Click here for the Tutorial list page.

I also take suggestions for Tutorial topics. You can leave your suggestion in the comments.

2 comments:

  1. This is such a terrific way to customize your widgets. Thank you for the instruction and awareness.

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  2. Good info! Thanks for posting this.

    ReplyDelete