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I am pleased to announce the first alpha release of Affiliates for All, version 0.1.0. 
This release is the same as 0.0.4 except that it adds Magento integration. When a user places an order, it will be entered in AfA in the ‘new’ state. When the order reaches the completed state in Magento, it will be updated to the ‘shipped’ state in AfA. Currently refunds have to be handled manually.
AfA is getting to the point where you could use it to implement a real affiliate programme. With this release, your affiliates would see screens which are essentially complete. As administrator, you might encounter a few rough edges. Also at present there is no documentation, so it would be rather awkward to set up.
As always, source code is available from:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/affiliates/
The demo is available at:
http://www.affiliatesforall.org/affiliates/
The admin account for AfA is still active, user name and password are both ‘Admin’. There is also a Magento account called ‘afa’ with password ‘afaafa’. You can log on with this account at:
http://www.affiliatesforall.org/magento/admin
The ‘afa’ account doesn’t have access to much of Magento, but you can use it to invoice and ship orders, which will cause AfA to be updated. It also has access to the screen where the AfA integration is configured. Please look but don’t touch! If you change the values entered there, nothing interesting will happen, it will just stop working…
Recently I’ve been making a release roughly every week. It will probably be two weeks until the next release, as I’m unlikely to be able to work on AfA much next week.
Incidentally, I was looking at JAM the other day. JAM supports lots of different mechanisms for paying affiliates, not just PayPal. Apart from that, though, we seem to have rough feature-parity. Not bad for a program that’s just over a month old!
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JoeC,
I agree about VAT-registered affiliates. I’ll address that if and when it becomes a problem. For now the most important thing is producing a usable ‘1.0’ release.
You can’t currently track incoming clicks; that’s an interesting point. You could get the information from something like Google Analytics, but it would make it a bit fiddly calculating conversion rates. You’d have to get the number of clicks from GA and the sales from AfA and combine the two.
You can link to any page in Magento and the cookie will be filled in. I agree that this is an important feature, I’m always amazed at the number of affiliate programmes that don’t do this.
Of course the current system is totally different to your reset button. You pay everyone at once using mass payments. Don’t forget, with PayPal you really want to use mass payments, because for some reason mass payments attract lower charges. (You also can’t fund them with a credit card, but that shouldn’t be a problem when paying affiliates.)
In theory you could use mass payments, but only put one payment at a time through the system. I can’t see the point in that, though. As soon as you’ve got more than a handful of affiliates, it’s going to get tedious. Even worse, you could make a mistake.
Mrjohnnycake,
Interesting point about American spellings, lots of people are going to want that. I do think it would be good to approach internationalisation in stages, so this would be a good way to start. We can get the basics worked out doing en_GB versus en_US. That will make it much simpler when someone wants to do French and suddenly all the messages need to be localised, not just a handful. And doing French will make it easier when someone wants to do Arabic and we have to think about right to left text, and so on…
I’ll probably try and get 1.0 out before doing any localisation, though. If you want to use it in the meantime, I don’t imagine there would be too many messages to patch, you could probably do it manually without an unreasonable amount of effort.
I’m taking donations from people who offer, but things have been quite quiet on that front recently! Whatever happens, though, there won’t be any charge for the completed program. It will be available under GPL just as the pre-release versions have been.
Hopefully you can now see the answer to your question about Magento. It’s something you have to sign into separately. I’m doing it this way so I can integrate with other carts at a later stage.
If you aren’t launching your business for another month, you might well find that AfA becomes usable just in time for you! You could probably make the current version work, but it would be a bit nasty, especially because there is no documentation. Once I’ve had a chance to write some documentation, it’s really just a case of fixing bugs and making sure that it is convenient to use in the common situations.
Pete
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