Useful Hack for Joomla Affiliate Sites

We’ve a new component hack for you today. Hopefully it will be useful to you if you’re running a Joomla site with affiliate links.


What it Does

The "Simply Links Cloaker" allows you to link one word on your site to an affiliate offer, no matter where it appears and it will automatically cloak the link. It offers two main benefits:

  • The ability to set links sitewide makes updating your links much, much easier.
  • Cloaking is a useful and commonly used method to avoid other people taking commissions generated by your hard work.

Combining Two Extensions

We used the code from two existing extensions:

  1. Simply Links. Allows you to link one keyword to a URL everywhere on a site. For example, sh404SEF links to our review of it, no matter where its written on the site.
  2. Affiliate Link Cloaker. A plugin that hides your affiliate links, although the cloaking has to be manually added to each link.

Possible Issues

Please post any extra bugs you find and we’ll continue to make this better.

One potential problem: It removes links if the word appears in h1, h2, h3 or h4 tags, but a couple of people have reported problems if the heading runs to two lines.

If this is a problem for you, remove the clearly-marked hack betweenn lines 204 to 215 in simplylinks.php.

Click here to download the Simply Links Cloaker. (registration required)

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