I’m proud to say that I finally completed the necessary work to 100% automate the grabbing and parsing of royalty and transaction information from CDBaby and getting it imported and working inside of word-press utilizing the “Product Vendors” and “Product Bundles” extensions.
So now our affiliated artists (our “vendors”), whom we license the right to have on our albums for a pro-rata split of net receipts, will automatically have their earnings totals updated instead of having to have me enter them by hand.
– The CDBSDC web scraper program logs into CDBaby and scrapes all of the account transaction logs on a daily basis. This is a custom program I wrote after repeated denied requests to CDBaby for access to “machine readable” transaction logs. (I do have to keep this program up to date with any changes to the CD Baby site though. I’ve also open-sourced it on GitHub)
– The WP Cron function is used to call a plugin script that checks weekly to see if the total amounts per album have changed.
– If a change > $1.00 is detected the script will then automatically create a new order for the album in WooCommerce. Each album is itself a bundled product, with multiple tracks making up the bundle. Each track is a vendor linked product, with the “vendor” being the artists affiliate account. Each vendor account is then updated with new commissions accordingly.
This has been a major goal of mine for a while, and having this type of integrated and automated functionality is one of the main reasons I’ve been working like crazy in my “spare” time to get the new website completed. It’s not perfect and there are a few things left that I need to tweak, but as of yesterday it’s completely functional.
-Jon