11,000 Thumbnails!
FULL SET OF THUMBNAILS!
I have just released a set of over 11,000 free product thumbnails! Login to your members only area and click on 'Your Purchases'. Download the bonus thumbnail pack. Filesize is about 46mb. Upload to your images/thumbnails folder and run the 'Sync Thumbnails' function listed in'Products Menu'.
These thumbnails are not of the quality of the previous thumbnail releases, but they look much better than the 'no image' thumbnail.
Enjoy!
New Parser & Database Index Bug Fix
New Parser
I've released a new update to the ClickBank product feed parser. This update will not add the weird internal ClickBank categories to your database. If you have already ran the new parser and removed the categories, this parser won't add anything new.
You can download it here: http://www.cbfront.com/parser.zip
Unzip and upload to your 'includes/admin/parser/' directory.
Database Bug
There is a database index bug that prevents ClickBank products from being imported into your database if the ClickBank ID has the same first 7 characters as another product already in your database. This affects anywhere from a couple hundred products to almost 1,000 products.
To fix this bug, you'll need access to your database through PHPMyAdmin or some other database access tool. You'll need to run the following two SQL query commands:
alter table cbf2_products drop index idx_lookup;
alter table cbf2_products add index idx_lookup(source_id, source_type);
Run the product importer and you should notice a bunch of new products.
The CBFront retail installation zip has been updated with this fix, so if you're planning on installing CBFront, download the latest cbfront2.zip file from 'Your Purchases' in the members-only section.
January, 2010 Update
Hello folks,
This post is an update on the latest from CBFront.
We've finally got a blog up! This is how we'll post updates and inform you on new features, templates, etc. You can subscribe to the blog or follow us on Twitter (http://twitter.com/cbfront). The news sidebar on your CBFront admin dashboard will also contain the latest blog posts.
New Ownership
Jessie Walker has moved on to other opportunities. My name is Christopher James. Jessie was the idea guy, tech support and marketer and I was the sole programmer. I've dealt with a few of you already in e-mails so you shouldn't notice much a difference as far as tech support goes.
New Host
This site has experienced downtime over the past few weeks. I've moved to a new host with more power so hopefully that will prevent further disruptions.
New Categories at ClickBank
If you've updated your CBFront product database by using the ClickBank importer, you may have gotten a page that says there were errors importing the product feed. This is a direct result of the new category structure at ClickBank. There's a new importer available, you can download it here. Put it in your 'cbfront/includes/Admin/Parser' folder. Many of the new categories are very similar to the old ones that are already on your site. This might lead to an extreme number of categories. I'm not sure what's the best way to handle this. You could delete all your current categories then import the product feed and be completely updated. There are a few categories that have nothing to do with the products (such as ClickBank Internal). I have no idea why those are in the XML feed. If you have any questions, please drop me an e-mail or comment below.
Thumbnails and Updated Product Info
There hasn't been an updated thumbnail pack in a while. I've been rethinking this feature of CBFront. The current implementation is not adequate. I certainly wish ClickBank had product thumbnails available, but they don't and it doesn't seem like anything is on the horizon. It takes a lot of time and effort to manually go to each product website, select an appropriate thumbnail image, re-size it, compress it and make it available. Each product that gets a thumbnail also needs an updated title and description. That's all manual as well. The titles and descriptions in the XML feed are written for affiliates. I'm not sure what to do. I've thought of offering the thumbnails and updated info as some kind of service. Basically you would update your installation of CBFront with a few news files and then it would use the cbfront.com website for product images, titles and descriptions. That would ensure you'd always have the latest product details and you would never have to upload new images and sync them. What do you think is a good solution?
Products other than ClickBank
I've had several requests for the ability to import products from other websites. Initially version 2 was going to include an option to import PayDotCom.com products but that isn't ready to go yet. I'd also like to support Amazon products and a few other storefront websites.
Better Editing Capabilities and more Templates
The squeeze page/content page editor is not perfect. It can be somewhat of a hassle to get even the most rudimentary pages up and going. I'd like the next version to have a smoother, faster editor along with multi-page ability for products. That way you could split-test several different landing pages per product.
I've been working on additional templates. I'll get those up as soon as I can. The template aspect of CBFront is extremely powerful, there's lots that you can accomplish using plugins. I'll be doing a few tutorials on that as well in the coming months.
