Alex Poole

As (the first) part of my series of affiliate tools for ClickBank merchants, here is some simple PHP code to create branded PDF documents for your affiliates, “on-the-fly”.

I originally mentioned I was going to sort out these affiliate tools the other week, and I’ve been working on a product that does this (and then some!), which I’ll sell next year. In the meantime, here’s how to easily create customised PDF documents from HTML documents. So you write a report as a (simple) web page, stick an affiliate link in it with the affliate ID as ##AFFID## or something, then when your affiliate comes to download it, you replace it with their affiliate ID at the last moment.

You’ll need to download the free FPDF library from http://www.fpdf.org/ Its the same library used by a commercial PHP-based PDF generator. There’s no install - just unzip it into a directory on your server somewhere.

This code is pretty much lifted from my old site http://www.get-articles.com/, which creates PDFs from database content. There is plenty more you can do with FPDF but this should give you the general idea:


<?php
//set title and content
$title = "This is my PDF document";
//get the affiliate ID from somewhere - this is just an example
$affiliate_id = $_COOKIE['aff_id'];
//get the HTML document from which to create the PDF
$body = file_get_contents(”document.html”);
//replace ##AFFID## with the actual affiliate’s ID - for example as part of a link.
//of course you could do any replacements you wanted here!
$body = str_replace(”##AFFID##’, $affiliate_id, $body);
//include FPDF library
require(”fpdf/fpdf.php”);
//don’t want to output anything before the PDF
error_reporting(0);
//start document
$pdf = new PDF;
$pdf -> AddPage();
//add a big title.
$pdf->SetFont(’Arial’,'B’,16);
//a third argument like ‘http://www.site.com/doc.html’ creates a link
$pdf->Write(16, $title);
//add main document
$pdf->SetFont(’Arial’, ”, 12);
$pdf->WriteHTML($body);
/*
render the pdf - the “D” tries to force the client to download the document instead of trying to display it directly in the browser, (which is sometimes a pain with FPDF)
*/
$pdfStr = $pdf->Output(”filename.pdf”, “D”);

I hope this is useful to you. Feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed if you want to get the next affiliate tool as soon as I post it

Tags:   clickbank · pdf1 Comment