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:

Not impressed, in order of complexity:

What ideas to steal from plugins?

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

Sources:

Compress Small Strings (URLs)

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


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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
date 01. Jan 0001 | modified 29. Dec 2023
filename: Problem - Wordpress Link Cloaking