 Free Customized Converter for Your Site Free Customization or Full Customization? XE.com offers two level of customization that enable webmasters to seamlessly integrate our Universal Currency Converter ® -- the world's most popular Internet currency tool -- into your site. Regardless of which you choose, both options give you:
Free Customization: What You Get Screenshot
This document describes how to put a customized version of the Universal Currency Converter, like the one pictured above, on your site. After reading through the legal information below, the process itself takes less than five minutes. By choosing XE.com as your currency partner, you are choosing the Internet's largest provider of foreign exchange tools and services. Independent industry rankings consistently confirm that more people -- and websites -- use our wide variety of simple and powerful currency tools than any others. Important Notes about the Customization Process You are free to design your own interface to the converter, using the customizing functionality that we have developed, provided that you adhere to the terms of use below. You are of course free to include advertisements or promotions on both your input page and results page. WARNING: Read these restrictions carefully! Use of the converter that does not conform to these restrictions is not permitted. Regretfully, misuse of our services has forced us to be more aggressive in pursuing legal action against violators of our internationally protected intellectual property rights. Our main goal is to keep the services running, which we need your help to do. Please conform to our requirements when customizing the service. We can and we do track the location of external input pages to ensure that they comply with the legal requirements. We freely encourage the use of our converter, but we must protect our copyright and trademark rights. Free Terms of Use XE.com extends to you or your organization the right to generate a customized version of the converter as a part of your Web resource provided that all of the following conditions are met.
Provided you do not affect form variables in the downloadable code, you are free to modify the "look and feel" of your input page in any way you desire. Or course, such modifications must be pursuant to the Terms of Use above, but other than that you're free to do whatever you want. We have made it possible to encode, on your converter's front page, special variables containing HTML output code that will appear on the results page. You don't have to customize the output page of the converter, but you can. If you don't customize the output page, we will just serve up our standard output page and it will look almost identical to what the user would see if they had used the main XE.com Universal Currency Converter page. If you do customize the output page, then the results page will be stripped down to the banner ad and the table containing the currency results, which will be inserted between a header and a footer that you specify. This will give you the appearance to make the output page match the look and feel of your own site. This is accomplished by adding two hidden variables to your page that will control the output page's "header" (everything above the currency conversion results) and "footer" (everything below). These tags should contain all of the HTML you would normally use to build a web page. For example, the header variable should contain the <HTML>, <HEAD>, and <BODY> tags. In addition, the footer variable should contain the </BODY> and <HTML> tags. Stated another way, the header and footer tags taken together should comprise a valid HTML document. The use of the header and footer variables is detailed below. To reiterate, the only things on the output page that you will not be able to control are (a) the appearance of the table containing the conversion results and (b) the appearance of a banner advertisement. (How else could we give you all this wonderful functionality for free?)
How to use the Header and Footer Variables Start from the Fast-Track instructions above. Once you have the quick-start code incorporated into your page, look for the line that says: <FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert.cgi"> Beneath this line, cut and paste the following two lines:
Here's what you need to know to use these variables properly:
That's all you need to know to make the output page look just about any way you want it to. You are free to reorder the currencies in the lists on your converter. However, you must move entire currency lines, including the <OPTION> and </OPTION> tags. You may want to set different default value for your converter. This is very easy to do. Presetting the "Amount" field: Just change the number in the VALUE="" portion of the INPUT tag. For example, to start with a default value of 50 currency units, your "Amount" input tag would look like this (the green text indicates where you preset the desired amount): <INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="Amount" VALUE="50" SIZE=10> Presetting the "To" or "From" currency field: Just move the word SELECTED to the currency of your choice. (Hint: It helps if this currency is near enough to the top of the list to be displayed in the selection window; otherwise, the user might not be aware that a selection has been preset.) The resulting preselected currency will look like this: <OPTION SELECTED>CHF Switzerland Francs</OPTION> Currencies that are not preselected (i.e. all the others in the list) will look like this: <OPTION>NLG Netherlands Guilders</OPTION> Remember, you can only identify one currency per list as SELCTED: one in the "From" SELECT list, and one in the "To" SELECT list. Sometimes it's not enough to preselect a currency: sometimes you want to give the user no choice in the matter and force the use of a certain currency. This is done by removing the selection areas and replacing them with hidden variables. Remember, for each variable that you "hard code" with a hidden variable, you must remove the corresponding input section. Place your hidden variables immediately after the following line in your front end: <FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert.cgi"> Now, here are some examples of how to create "hard coded" hidden variables: Hard coding the "Amount" variable: Here is an example of how to hard code the "Amount" variable to be exactly 100.00: <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="Amount" VALUE="100.00"> Hard coding the "From" currency variable: Here is an example of how to hard code the "From" variable to be U.S. Dollars (USD): <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="From" VALUE="USD"> Hard coding the "From" currency variable: Here is an example of how to hard code the "To" variable to be Euro (EUR): <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="To" VALUE="EUR"> Your version of the service is not limited to the "default" set of currencies that we provide. You are free to add as many other currencies as you wish. (Our services do support every world currency unit!) You can obtain extra desired currencies by "cutting and pasting" from the "Full" Universal Currency Converter. For example, let's say you wanted to add the Guatemala Quetzal to your converter, in your "From" currency list. All you would have to do is add the following line in the desired spot between the <SELECT NAME="From"> tag, and the corresponding </SELECT> tag: <OPTION>GTQ Guatemala Quetzal</OPTION> You would probably want to add a similar entry in the "To" currency list, so that people could perform conversions either way. However, if you are adding more than a few extra currencies, it might be easier just to customize the full version instead. (Instructions currently under development.) Please keep in mind that we have two versions of the converter, "regular" and "full", for a good reason. Most people never use any more than the top 70 currencies in the regular converter -- in fact, the vast majority (85%) use just the top 10 currencies! The more currencies you have, the harder it is for people to find their desired currency, and the longer it takes the page to load. You are of course free to list as many currencies as you want, but we recommend that -- for the sake of your users -- you carefully consider the list of currencies you will need. Sometimes, as they say, less is more. You are also free to remove currencies from your converter, as outlined below. Just as you are free to add currencies to your converter, you are free to remove currencies from either the "To" and "From" fields of your converter. More often than not, this is actually a very good thing to do. Why would you want to remove currencies? As we have already mentioned, 85% of the people using our services are served by the top 10 currencies alone! Every currency you add to this list increases the time it takes for a user to find their currency. You should try to tailor the currencies you support to the actual needs of your users. While "listing them all" may seem like a good idea, your users may not agree. In fact, there are circumstances where you might want to remove all currencies except for one, as outlined below. By default, your converter will display date and time information in Universal Coordinated Time ("UTC"), also known as Greenwich Mean Time ("GMT"); or Zulu Time ("Zulu"). All of the these refer to the same thing: the time of day at the "prime meridian", which is 0°rees; longitude. UTC is widely used as a reference timezone. However, if you suspect that your converter will be used primarily by people in a specific time zone, then you can set the converter to display any date and time information in that timezone. This is done by passing a hidden variable to the converter. For example, let's say you lived in Toronto, Canada and wanted to set the timezone for your converter appropriately. You would include the following code in you FORM: <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="timezone" VALUE="EST5EDT"> Both the variable name "timezone" and the timezone value itself are case-sensitive. "EST5EDT" is the time zone for New York City and much of the eastern United States. For other locations, replace this code with the appropriate timezone. The following is a list of time zone codes than can be passed to the converter. Codes with both "ST" and "DT" suffixes, such as the "EST5EDT" in the above example, will automatically respect daylight savings time in your area.
While we cannot support development of free customizations, we can provide modifications to the standard service for a fee. For more information, please see our Full Customization page. |
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