Link Cloaking

Synonyms: Link Cloaking, Affiliate Link Marketing Plugins

The basic functionalities I need:

• Customizable link URL prefixes
• NoFollow options
• Open in new window options

Extra features needed:

• SubID Link Tracking
• Automatic import of sales data from networks
• Google Click Tracking (after)

Plugins reviewed

• WP No External Links is the oldest and probably the most popular one. Quite simple, open-source and quite extensible. Not perfectly coded, though. More articles: one and more Encrypting links for WP-NoExternalLinks # Articles #Jehy

  I have developed my plugin based on this.

• Shortn.It has all required functionality. Not great coding, but it is interesting that short-URL data is stored as metadata of the post, which is actually very logical. No analytics or nothing more.

  Why not put shortened URL as metadata? For vouchers it would be logical, but for any other link it is not, and quite often we need links that are not written as vouchers.

• WP2Affiliate / WP to Affiliate, Deeplink-Generator & Cloaking This one is very interesting. It works exactly as it should, and more. I has automatic and manual entry. It also generates deep-links for all the big German networks.

• WP-LinkChanger this plugin is not maintained, and only in German. But it does similar thing. More a short script than a plugin, I can use it as an inspiration point if needed.

Good ones, but only manual entry plugins:

• Shorty Lite and it’s friend Shorty Pro SubID Tracking & How To Use It This one probably has everything we need but almost everything is in Premium version. Still not sure if it supports auto-cloaking.

  Shorty Pro has Affiliate SubID Tracking to track commissions from any affiliate network. Explained how it is done: Shorty WP Cloaker Review And Bonus

• Premium Link Cloaker Lite Very simple, nicely coded, uninstall hook. Out of the box, all the links must be created manually.

• Affiliate Links Lite and a brother Affiliate Links Pro and a whole site for it Affiliate Links WordPress Plugin. Anyway, classic manual entry link manager. Not bad, very nicely coded.

• URL Shortener by MyThemeShop is very nice plugin, but only for manual cloaked links.

• WP Cloaker is quite normal manual entry link manager, using custom types, nicely coded.

• SEO Ultimate also has Link Mask Generator.

Not impressed, in order of complexity:

• Pretty Link Lite and it’s friend Pretty Link Pro It is like big advertisement and bloated, poorly coded. Manual link entry, similar to Premium Link Cloaker, but much worst. Good thing is that is directly supported by Affiliate Power plugin. It is apsolutely the most popular of all plugins with 200 000 users.

• ThirstyAffiliates is really nothing special, manual entry. Everything should be purchased paid via add-ons, but they also are not spectacular.

• Simple URLs with more info here is the most basic plugin. Just URL custom type and only couning on visits. Manual redirects.

• Easy Affiliate Links is manual entry, but not too advanced. Nothing special.

• Clink - WordPress Link Manager Just another custom type with manual link creation.

• WP Wizard Cloak is classic manual entry, but I think it is abandoned. WP Dynamic Links is same plugin from the same author?

• WP Affiliate Links is just a fork of WP Wizard Cloak

• WP All Import has Addon The Link Cloaking Add-On to cloak all links even during an import.

• Linker is too simple, manual entry cloaker.

• ShortLink Analytics by SVS-Websoft is the most basic manual entry, poorly executed.

• Affiliate Link Cloaking is very old and totally unmaintained plugin, with catastrophic coding.

• Simple Link Cloaker is not a cloaker but simplest form of simplest redirection.

• Url Shortener Ultimate doesn’t even work.

What ideas to steal from plugins?

• stats and DB: Premium Link Cloaker Lite
• analytics or DB maybe from: ShortLink Analytics by SVS-Websoft

Sources:

• How to Cloak Affiliate Links on Your WordPress Site
• 5 Best WordPress Affiliate Link Marketing Plugins

Compress Small Strings (URLs)

I will need the fastest PHP library to compress URL strings.

• Hashids - generate short unique ids from integers I will probably use this to obfuscate voucher ID.

• compress small strings - Google Search An efficient compression algorithm for short text strings - Stack Overflow shoco - a fast compressor for short strings

• I can’t use SMAZ as it generating binary data. antirez/smaz is small strings compression library.

  personalcomputer/smaz.js: Port of smaz (https://github.com/antirez/smaz) to Javascript. PHP ports: zhenhao/smaz.php, sepehr-laal/psmaz

• shoco

• RotURL - gansbrest/roturl: RotURL is a simple substitution cipher for encoding/obscuring URLs embedded in other URLs (e.g. in a querystring) RotUrl: encode/obfuscate URLs for use in other URLs

About this: Auto-Incrementing IDs: Giving your Data Away | Phil Sturgeon

Best & simplest: tiny/tiny.php at master · kylebragger/tiny

zackkitzmiller/tiny-php: A reversible base62 ID obfuscater Auto-Incrementing IDs: Giving your Data Away | Phil Sturgeon

or this: defuse/php-encryption: Simple Encryption in PHP.

I will need to use “masking” (reading URL from database) as in this way, URLs are extremly long.

Also:

jenssegers/optimus: Id obfuscation based on Knuth’s multiplicative hashing method for PHP.

How to write a redirector? (vouchers)

url rewriting - How to create custom URL routes? - WordPress Development Stack Exchange

Rewriting URLs in WordPress: Tips and Plugins - Hongkiat Rewrite API « WordPress Codex

php - Is there a way to use the Wordpress users but without loading the entire Wordpress core? - WordPress Development Stack Exchange WordPress Internals: How WordPress Boots Up Part 2 - Theme.fm

Maybe some realtime notifications?

Webhook Slack Testing cURL:

curl -X POST --data-urlencode 'payload={"channel": "#w_saveup", "username": "webhookbot", "text": "This is posted to #w_saveup and comes from a bot named webhookbot.", "icon_emoji": "👻"}' https://hooks.slack.com/services/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