sunPress

Use WordPress to quickly create and manage a holiday website utilising sunshine.co.uk’s award winning affiliate programme. The sunPress plugin will allow you to easily add destinations and accommodations found on sunshine.co.uk. The plugin also comes with a XML search widget allowing you to serve availability results to your users directly on your own site.

More info:

• sunPress.
• Check out our Affiliate Area showing all the tools on offer from sunshine.co.uk
• Sign up to the sunshine.co.uk with either Paid On Resultsaffiliate programme or Affiliate Futureaffiliate programme before installing.

Example sunPress sites –
* http://expo3.sunshines.co.uk/
* http://expo2.sunshines.co.uk/
* http://expo1.sunshines.co.uk/
* http://expo.sunshines.co.uk/

Initialising

• Once the plugin has been activated, click on the new sunPress tab that appears.
• This page shows the steps required to start using your plugin.
• First specify your affiliate network and add your affiliate id by clicking on the ‘Settings’ tab, entering the ID into the box, and clicking on ‘Update Affiliate ID’.
• Secondly add or request your XML credentials required for the search functionality of the plugin. This can be done on the same ‘Settings’ tab, down the bottom.
• The next step is to activate the search box widget that will allow the customer to search on your site. Click on Design (or Appearance, WordPress > 2.6.2), then click on Widgets. At the bottom you will see sunPress Search, click on Add beside this, then ‘Save Changes’.
• That’s all that is required to start using the search functionality on your site. If you would like to add content using the content management tools we built into WordPress, please read on.

Content Structure

• Please ensure before enabling the content tools, you have activated your sunPress [agent|guide|basic] theme (if applicable). This will ensure the main ‘pages’ such as ‘All Inclusive Holidays’, ‘Bargain Holidays’ e.t.c. are assigned the correct template. If you have already activated the tools without doing this, please click on Manage->Pages and manually set the page templates within each page. This can be done by editing each page, scrolling down to Page Template, and selecting ‘pages’ from the drop down menu. Then ‘save’. Once activated follow the steps below.

• From the ‘Settings’ tab, check the ‘Enable Content Tools’ box, and click on ‘Save Changes’.

• You will now see a new ‘Content’ tab with the sunPress group, click on this.
• The first option allows you to automatically download up to date hotels/resorts/regions/countries from our feeds
• If you look under Content Options, you will see a country list and a resort list, using these you can select a area to add to your blog. Countries and regions are added as categories, resorts as tags and hotels as posts
• Once you have selected a country or just a resort click on ‘Create Content Page’ to populate your blog.
• Once finished, visit the Manage tab to edit any of the cats or posts just created.

Media Images

• When you edit a hotel that has been added as a post on wordpress, there is a media bar for adding images.
• The media bar is just above the editable post content box on the right handside.
• If you select the sunshine.co.uk icon from the end of the media bar list, you will be provided with a list of images for the hotel.
• Please note, in order to be able to add these images into your post, you must make the following directory editable /wp-content/uploads/hotelimages. If it doesn’t exist, please create it.
• Most FTP programs allow you to ‘chmod’ or edit permissions on a folder. Once you have enabled write access, the images you insert into your post will be stored locally.

Installation is easy:

• Download the plugin.
• Copy the folder to the plugins directory of your blog.
• Enable the plugin in your admin panel.