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Comments on MTAmazon 2.0

MTAmazon is a Movable Type plugin that displays products from Amazon.com on your site. It allows flexible searching and display of products from any of Amazon’s product categories. New in version 2.0 is caching, related products searching, and more tags for Amazon product information. Continue reading...

Comments

There are 25 comments. If you haven't already done so, you might want to read the original article that inspired these comments.

Kenneth Hunt July 27, 2002 12:51 PM

Could you post a few more examples? I haven’t gotten it working yet. Also is MTAmazonDevToken need in the template?

Adam Kalsey July 27, 2002 2:35 PM

devtoken is required in the template unless you have set a default developer’s token in amazon.pl

I’ll work up some more examples and post them.

paulr July 29, 2002 7:17 PM

Adam, the package looks really nice, but I can’t get it to work! When I include an MTAmazon container in an entry or template, I get a bunch of errors:

plugins/amazon.pl did not return a true value at /usr/www/users/robichau/cgi-bin/lib/MT.pm line 79

ConfigMgr.pm is OK; I don’t have a plugins dir defined in my mt.cfg file, but I can load another (dead-simple) plugin in the plugins dir, so I don’t think that’s the problem. Any suggestions?

yosshi July 29, 2002 8:59 PM

can i use this wonderful plugin with www.amazon.co.jp? i am Japanese actualy.

Adam Kalsey July 29, 2002 11:11 PM

Try putting the line:

1;

at the end of amazon.pl.

Adam Kalsey July 29, 2002 11:13 PM

I don’t think that Amazon offers their Web services interface for their non-US sites. You could ask them when they plan on supporting Web services outside the US.

paulr July 30, 2002 2:53 AM

I added the “1;”, but no dice. Maybe I’m doing the wrong thing— can I use the tag within an entry, or only within templates?

Adam Kalsey July 30, 2002 10:21 AM

Movable Type doesn’t process tags inside entries, so there’s no way to use MTAmazon tags in an entry.

Dave Bitton August 3, 2002 9:12 PM

I’m getting this error on rebuild:

MT::App::CMS=HASH(0x82101c0) print on closed filehandle MT::CACHE at plugins/amazon.pl line 335.

What is it, and how do I fix?

Dave Bitton August 3, 2002 9:39 PM

I solved the prob. $cachdir in amazon.pl needs to be “plugins/cache” and not “./cache”. I added a use CGI::Carp and then carp’ed the pwd, and it’s the root MT dir, and not plugin. Once I added plugins/ to the dir, it works. :)

Adam Kalsey August 3, 2002 10:00 PM

It sounds like you put the “cache” directory in the wrong place. The cache directory should be directly under the mt directory, not inside the plugins directory.

I reread the installation instructions and they were ambiguous, so I altered them to better explain where the cache directory goes.

Sorry for any grief this caused.

Adriaan Tijsseling August 4, 2002 5:40 AM

I’m getting the same error: Build error in template ‘Main Index’: Error in tag: Error in tag: close go back

MT::App::CMS=HASH(0x81eb094) print() on closed filehandle MT::CACHE at plugins/amazon.pl line 335. MT::App::CMS=HASH(0x81eb094) print() on closed filehandle MT::CACHE at plugins/amazon.pl line 335. MT::App::CMS=HASH(0x81eb094) print() on closed filehandle MT::CACHE at plugins/amazon.pl line 335. MT::App::CMS=HASH(0x81eb094) Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) at [..]/lib/MT/Builder.pm line 76.

I have the cache in the right directory (directly under the MT dir). My template contains the following array:

random amazon list

” target=”_top”>, ,

” target=”_top”>,

” target=”_top”>, ,

” target=”_top”>, ,

Can you help me out here?

Adriaan Tijsseling August 4, 2002 5:50 AM

sigh I see all kinds of brackets were converted. Oh well, I fixed one thing: By setting the permissions of the cache to 776, I got rid of the “MT::App::CMS=HASH(0x81eb094) print() on closed filehandle MT::CACHE at plugins/amazon.pl line 335.”, but I’m still getting the “MT::App::CMS=HASH(0x81eb094) Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) at [..]/lib/MT/Builder.pm line 76.” error. I use a repetition of 4 tags, each with a different search string. I notice it is saved ok in the cache folder. (Btw, this did work well in the first version of MTAmazon.)

Adriaan Tijsseling August 4, 2002 5:56 AM

My apologies! I didn’t see that the newest version is hosted somewhere else. Version 2.0.2 solved my problem. So, please ignore or delete my previous comments.

Carla August 8, 2002 5:59 AM

Could you please give some functional examples, with their output?

Adam Kalsey August 9, 2002 9:32 AM

I’ve posted three sample templates along with the output they produce at http://kalsey.com/blog/2002/08/mtamazonsampletemplates.stm

Michael Bravo May 28, 2003 3:53 PM

It is probably my faulty understanding of MT plugin functionality, but…

is there a way to use MTAmazon tags in the text of posts, and not in the templates? Judging by the existence of text formatting plugins, it seems that processing of actual entry contents is possible…

Adam Kalsey May 28, 2003 8:46 PM

MT does not process tags inside entry text. It doesn’t even look to see if any are there. Text formatting plugins work differently. The MT engine passes the text through the foratting plugin before writing it to the page.

The only way to get MT to process tags is through the use of my process tags plugin: http://kalsey.com/2002/08/processtagsplugin/

Make sure you read the security concerns with the plugin at http://kalsey.com/2002/08/processtagssecurity_update/

Michael Bravo May 29, 2003 6:31 AM

Thanks! I really appreciate the advice and the effort gone into your plugins.

By the way, there is a typo on the processtags plugin page ( http://kalsey.com/2002/08/processtagsplugin/ ), where it names processplugins attribute instead of the correct (shown just below) process_tags. Perhaps this can deconfuse someone when fixed :)

Laura in DC November 17, 2003 3:14 PM

Is there a similar tool for blogger?

Trackback from bloomfield.me.uk
January 3, 2004 3:26 PM
MTAmazon
Excerpt: I'm having a bit of a play around with the MTAmazon plugin....

Al November 25, 2004 3:48 PM

Is 3.0 ever going to come out?

Trackback from What's New
February 24, 2005 8:40 PM
Reading List Fix
Excerpt: A massive thanks to heyblog for a most elegant MT-Amazon workaround that has finally allowed me to start updating my...

GC June 14, 2005 4:50 AM

Hi … trying to install MTAmazon for the first time and MT isn’t picking up the plugin. I have BookQueueToo installed which appears in the plugin list fine. When I click on that plugin I get the error:

“An error occurred: Your server does not have MTPlugins::MTAmazon installed, or MTPlugins::MTAmazon requires another module that is not installed. MTPlugins::MTAmazon is required. Please consult the installation instructions for help in installing MTPlugins::MTAmazon”

XML::Simple (v2.14) and LWP::UserAgent (v2.001) are both installed.

amazon.pl and .mtamazon.config are in the plugins folder and MTAmazon.pm is in the extlib folder.

Am I missing something?

Thanks.

GC.

cm July 6, 2005 9:38 AM

hi, would it be possible to use this plugin to get all the product reviews for a particular REVIEWER at amazon, not by product?


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