Buy.at Content Engine - Making Active Content Creation As Easy As ...

I must admit Tradedoubler put me off these types of tools for a long time. And that's my loss! Now Buy.at's Content Creation tool entitled "ContentEngine" makes content creation so damn easy only need a couple of minutes at most to get as useful list of relevant products to drop into a blog post of or align with your written content.

Products
Simply you choose a search phrase and refine it by category. Then you get the option to conduct the product search by the Boolean method or natural search. You then select which merchants you'd like to promote and then choose if the products you want to show have offers or show all of them.

Design
This is the bit that normally lets these tools down. You've got so much control over the look and feel. Its great!

Content
You've got loads of control over the length of product names and descriptions - fantastic.

Tracking
This is important if you're working across sites or within different sections. A standard element but crucial.

Template
If you're working with the same design across a site then you can save the templates and load them up at later date.

Get Code
This is the bit that lets it down. I'd like a php include option, and I'd expect others would too. Also the string is sooo long. I know its because they give you loads of options, but I think the variable names could be shortened. There is a benefit however of having these longer names and that's to simplify inline editing - so its still very good.

Preview
It's also great in that you get a preview mode. It's obviously expected, but But.at offer it with no bells and whistles and you've just got to click the button and it's there without loading it in a crappy pop-up.

Well done guys!

But there were a couple of things I didn't like. When it does show the drop down to search it didn't show a sub-category, if there isn't one then it should show the sub cat box (Ajax?).

Also we should be able to limit the categories that can be showed (unless I missed it).