I’ve just added (the beginnings of) a new feature to YAK (user-funded development) that will probably only be useful to one or two users — but it’s worth mentioning anyway.

REMOTE SERVER NOT SET is a new tag which can be used in a product post. This allows you to set up a store on one blog, then use the products (posts) on another. The basic idea is that you can have a central store with all your products, then separate (smaller) sites which pull in specific relevant products. When you click the buy button on the smaller site you are, of course, redirected to the central store.

There are 2 fundamental limitations:

1. it currently only works with libcurl (thus your PHP install must have curl enabled)
2. there is no way (at the moment) to redirect back to the original site. For example, the central store might be setup on site A, and 2 or 3 specific products linked on site B. A customer clicks the buy button on a product in site B, and is redirected to the shopping cart on A. At which point the cart should present a link to return the customer to the calling page.

Usage of the new function will be as follows:

1. On the Yak->Settings, under the Advanced tab, set a remote server and path. For example:

http://myserver.com

/myblog

2. In a post, use the tag: [yak_get_remote_n] where n is the id of the post in the remote store. For example:

[yak_get_remote_9]

Which will embed the content of post #9.

The new functionality does point toward a necessity for affiliate functionality (as briefly mentioned here) — but that’s a much larger effort that may need to wait. The new tag is currently in the repository, and will appear in the next release of YAK.