Announcing: "Vitrine", a Drupal module for affiliate marketing

The Vitrine module provides sidebar blocks, which are able to embed nodes, belonging to the same taxonomy category as the page, the user is currently reading.

Vitrine was written with bloggers in mind, who blog about a diverse set of topics, want to earn money through affiliate marketing and need a way to show different product recommendations based on the the category of blog posts.
With the vitrine module, this becomes an easy task. Product recommendations are simply put into nodes of a configurable content type and tagged with the desired term(s). The vitrine block than picks a set (chosen either randomly or by date) of these nodes to embed, which match the term(s) of the blog post. Default nodes may be set up to show, if there are no matching nodes.

Although being primarily written for bloggers and affiliate marketing, Vitrine is designed to be as generic as possible and does not depend upon the blog module.

Installation

• Extract the tarball into your modules directory.
• Enable the module. This will automatically create a new content type
  'exhibit' (if it does not already exists), which can be used as a datasource to populate vitrine blocks.
  NOTE: This is only the suggested default datasource. The module can be
  configured to use any content type for this purpose.
• Enable the desired vocabularies for the 'exhibit' content type under
  admin/content/taxonomy.
• Optionally adjust permissions under admin/user/permissions for the
  'exhibit' content type, if users other than the site admininistrator should be
  allowed to populate the vitrine blocks.
• Activate and configure vitrine blocks under admin/build/block. Each block can have it's individual content type as a datasource and can be configured to embed a list of default nodes in case no matching ones are available. NOTE: A vitrine block that has no content will not display.

Using

There are two ways to populate the vitrine. The first is by creating nodes of the type, that is the designated datasource for a vitrine block, the second is to provide a list of nodes, which are are to be embedded, if no other nodes fit. A vitrine block, that does not have any content will not show.

Vitrine blocks will only embed the contents of the node body field. Input format filters do apply. Title, comments and CCK fields do not matter.

Nodes, containing vitrine content should be left in the unpublished state in order to not show up in taxonomy lists.