Mcneri’s Blog

Many bloggers and in fact anyone with any form of online business may from time to time want to include an online shop in their blog. Others may also want to embed a job board within their blog. The advantage of this is that the shop/job board can be promoted under the same umbrella of promoting the parent website or blog and the website owner would thus promote and sell third-party products/services and make some money.

I was faced with this problem a short while ago. Initially with my amazon aStore and later with my Job Board.I attempted to do it but I kept failing and getting frustrated. I searched the internet for answers and eventually I came across this code on wordpress.org. The article was written by the owner of ORMSblog and it worked fine for me with the Job Board.

There are several steps.

1. Copy and past this php code into a text editor like notepad or wordpad

<?php

/*

Template Name: (whatever you want to call the file so that you will know what it is like amazonstore or jobamatic)

*/

?>

<?php get_header(); ?>

<iframe src=”(here put link to the webpage that is your store or job-board)” width=”100%” height=”600″

frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”0″></iframe>

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/show_categories.php’); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

2. Save the file as (Template name).php, edit the parameters width and height so that it fits into the dimentions of your blog and then upload the file into the folder holding your blog theme. In my case,

/public_html/wordpress/wp-content/themes/(Theme name)./(Template name).php.

3. Go to your wordpress Dashboard and write new page and name it what you want your store or job board to be called. At the bottom, select a template. there you will see a drop-down list and one of them will be the name of this php file you just uploaded (Template name).php, but without the .php.

4. Publish your new page and view it live on your blog as its own page.

As a quick note, I do not know how easy this would be for Blogger and wordpress dot com blogs. It needs access to one’s root directory and that is easily applicable in self-hosted wordpress blogs. All the text within ( ) need to be replaced with one’s own text/url or filename depending on which one. I hope this helps. Ask your questions in the comments section and I will be happy to answer. Meanwhile do check out my job board or advertise on my job site by following the link at the lower right hand corner.

This post is tagged Amazon aStore, embed website, job-a-matic