Zencart Twitter Sync Coupons

Zencart
Zen-Cart

This is my latest add on from Zencart. This addon for Zencart allows a store owner to add a twitter has tag on the coupon admin page. Customers will need to register their twitter usernames with you store. Once this is all setup a user can tweet the Twitter hash tag, and they will be emailed the actual coupon code/offer. The Twitter hash tag can anything you set, but you would like would want something unique to your store.

This still allows all the same feature and benefits of standard coupons in Zencart. You can still set the minimum order, expiration date, and number of redemptions. Anytime a user has been emailed the coupon for the Twitter hash tag, Zencart will log it, so a user will only get emailed once. This also allows for the possibility to see who has tweeted which hashtags, and when.

There are two original zencart files for create account that have to edited (included in download), to add the Twitter username to their account. The only requirement for this to work is to setup a cron job. A cron job is the name for a file/script that automatically runs at a set time. This addon does not require any API keys, or even have a Twitter account.  This uses Twitters GET method to fetch the hash tags. The searches are limited to 150 requests per hour.  You will need to take  how many hash tags you will be tracking, and divide that number into 150.

Example:

You are going to track 3 hash tags. 150 (request limit) / 3 (# of hash tags) = 50 request / hour. That’s a little less than a minute, so you would want to set your cron job to run, at most, every 2 minutes. You can set a longer period time, but Twitter allows you to fetch the last 100 tweets for a hash tag. You can set the time limit to be longer if you know you will not receive that many tweets in the 2 minute time period.

Installation:

  1. Merge/copy the  orginal files:
    includes/modules/pages/account_edit.php
    admin/coupon_admin.php
  2. Rename the two file locations to match the name of your template in the zip package
    includes/modules/CUSTOM
    includes/templates/CUSTOM
  3. Upload the rest of the zip package.
  4. Login to your admin page
  5. Click link at top of page to install Twitter Coupons
  6. Add a hashtag to a coupon
  7. Setup cron job for the file /cron_twitter_coupons.php
  8. Donate to this cool add on 🙂
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Download Zencart Twitter Coupons