How to easily customize the Affiliate Area

The Affiliate Area is the most important page on your website for your affiliates. It’s a place for affiliates to log in and see how well they are performing, check their earnings, update their settings, retrieve their referral URL, find creatives to promote your site, and more!

Not only does AffiliateWP blend seamlessly with the currently installed WordPress theme (so your affiliates feel right at home), but it allows you to extensively customize how this area appears to your affiliates.

Here are some easy ways you can do this:

Affiliate Area Tabs

We recently launched the free Affiliate Area Tabs add-on. This allows you as the site admin to add your own custom tabs, and link them with existing WordPress pages. The pages used for the tab content are restricted only to affiliates. The possibilities are endless; you might like to add a “Frequently Asked Questions” tab, an “Important Dates” tab, a “News” tab, or anything else you can dream up.

With our most recent update for Affiliate Area Tabs (requires AffiliateWP version 1.8.1), you can also remove the tabs that AffiliateWP creates by default! One tab or many, custom or default, the choice is completely up to you.

Affiliate Area Shortcodes

If you don’t like using tabs and would like to split the Affiliate Area across multiple pages, or you’d prefer to have everything on one page, then the free Affiliate Area Shortcodes add-on is for you. This add-on provides a whopping 18 shortcodes for fine-tuned control over the Affiliate Area. We’ve seen all kinds of implementations from our customers using this add-on!

Template files

AffiliateWP contains template files that allow you to further edit every aspect of the Affiliate Area. All you need to do is copy over a template file from the AffiliateWP plugin, and place it into your child theme. In doing so, your modifications won’t be lost when AffiliateWP is updated.

There are 8 template files related to the Affiliate Area:

dashboard.php
The affiliate dashboard

dashboard-tab-urls.php
The “URLs” tab of the affiliate dashboard

dashboard-tab-stats.php
The “Stats” tab of the affiliate dashboard

dashboard-tab-graphs.php
The “Graphs” tab of the affiliate dashboard

dashboard-tab-referrals.php
The “Graphs” tab of the affiliate dashboard

dashboard-tab-visits.php
The “Visits” tab of the affiliate dashboard

dashboard-tab-creatives.php
The “Creatives” tab of the affiliate dashboard

dashboard-tab-settings.php
The “Settings” tab of the affiliate dashboard

Check out the documentation for instructions on how to use and modify template files.

Via custom development

And finally, if you’re a developer wanting to make a custom plugin for AffiliateWP, or you’re helping a client with some super-custom Affiliate Area modifications, you’ll want to know how to add tabs programmatically.

We’ve published an easy-to-follow, start-to-finish guide on how to add a new tab and its content on our documentation site – be sure to check it out!

About the author: Andrew Munro co-founded AffiliateWP in early 2014. His trusty treadmill desk allows him to write code at an incredible 3 mph, making him the fastest developer around.

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