Comments

I’d like to see the option to filter my wishlist to books, only, since the rest of the items aren’t relevant to my “Books wishlist” sidebar at my site.

Kickass! :-)

“Got a community photoblog? Show your users low-budget digital cameras and camera phones.”

Not just for photoblogs either—paging Gizmodo…?

Okay, on to features requests…

• I don’t suppose it’s possible to fetch image height and width tags for product images? Lots of the book jacket photos are odd sizes, so I can’t just stick in a default value, since some are wider than usual. And no height/width tags means my page layout looks screwy until all the images load.

• Can we split the product line “books” into fiction and non-fiction somehow, or is that a failing on amazon’s backend that they don’t distinguish between the two?

• Can we start with a default book (or other product) ID and list things related to it, or other books related to it that people have also ordered?

• This could probably be accomplished with one of the MT plugins like IfEmpty, but if a category comes back empty, can we have some default text show up, like N/A?

• Can we round off the average customer rating to the nearest .5 or 1 so that we can use images of stars for that field? For example, if a book has a rating of 4.39, let’s have MTAmazon round that to 4.5 automatically, from which I can then make it load “4.5.gif” which would be a GIF of 4.5 stars.

I’ll probably think of more…

Too bad IMDB makes you license their data (by paying through the nose), because I’d really, really love a MTIMDB plug-in, especially combined with MTAmazon so you can look-up details on a movie and then buy it…

I think it would be really cool to add multiple items to your cart. For instance, if you want to link to a camera, flash card, and excellent dp book, and call it a “Digital Photography Bundle”, there should be an option to one click add all items to cart.

The actual use I have in mind is when a teacher assigns a reading list. With one click, the student could add all books to their cart, and a teacher could get a commission and use it to pad their own wallet, or perhaps pay for class supplies or something.

Now that Amazon.co.uk is offering web services, I would like the tag option to specify which to use so that I can provide links for both UK and USA visitors. It’s a real shame just to cater for those in the USA.

In the meantime, thanks for a great plug-in!

— Ian

This is great! Like asparagirl I’d like image sizes, and rounding on the stars :)

I thought of something else I want :)

Without using a category to specify my “currently reading”, I’d like to be able to mark that book, somehow. I display that in my sidebar (of a book log). I currently use «MTEntryCategory» for the Author, so I really don’t want to use it for something else too. Until now I’ve used a php include to display the current book details. I tried using a php include to place the Asin in the MTAmazon search tag, but that wouldn’t work. The error was that no search string was specified, probably because that bit isn’t parsed until the page loads. A way around that would be awesome!

Whare are you storing the ASIN?

The reason the PHP include won’t work is that MTAmazon creates the page when you rebuild. The PHP runs when the page is requested, so by the time the PHP includee runs, MTAmazon has already run.

The reason I ask where you are storing the ASIN is that you could do something like

<MTAmazon method=”Asin” search=”[MTEntryKeywords]”>

This would insert the contents of the keywords tag into the MTAmazon search.

I changed the MTAmazon.pm module to work with the upcoming german amazon.de AWS. It already works at my site for the archived articles. The diff from the last version is under: http://www.it-weblog.de/amazonde.diff

I had two problems befor patching: 1) It got an XML parsing error for empty amazon search results 2) It returned utf8 strings into my iso html which made it very bad behaved :-) so now I converted most strings to iso via a “tr” command.

I am storing it MTEntryExcerpt, but the problem is that the particuar book I’m referring to isn’t necessarily the book referred to in the entry, nor the latest entry, nor even necessarily the one before that.

MT isn’t going to know which entry the tag is related to, unless I store that (the entry id) somewhere static too.

found another wish for my list :)

I’d like the amazon data to be xhtml compliant :) There’s an ampersand in one of the titles on my wish list, it would be much nicer if it were an &amp;

something really odd is happening with my wishlist. It’s displayed in my site (at http://the-onion.net/books/), but incase it fixes itself I’ve taken a screenshot, showing the highlighted link, which says “Descartes in p0 Minutes P…”. That isn’t on my wishlist. However, if you click the link, you get a book that is! Here’s the screenshot - http://the-onion.net/p-ink/amazonerror.jpg This is the link -http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0941807746/theonion01-20/104-2407385-0906322?dev-t=D4I4SDJV7IURR

There are quite a few titles (8/20) that are displaying the wrong text. I’ve done nothing, so far, to try to correct this, like rebuild my cache or anthing.

Richard, you can filter the results using the Compare plugin to parse out the results you want by comparing the amazon catalog entry.

One question I have, and I apologize for asking this here because I tried the sourceforge mailing list archives and they seem to be down, is lately I have not been able to get the plugin to work, it was working for a brief while then I started getting this error: Loading external module ‘MTPlugins::MTAmazon’: Error opening file ‘/.mtamazon.config’: No such file or directory at extlib/MTPlugins/MTAmazon.pm line 509, line 18. Compilation failed in require at (eval 27) line 3, line 1

Any thoughts on why this error is occurring? I checked the .mtamazon.config file and even reinstalled everything. The cache directory is empty.

Adam, I would need a multi-locale feature. What I want is an Amazon-Integration to Amazon(US) and Amazon(DE) in one template… the whole thing shall be configurable i.e. via a tag or so..

My idea is to lead german visitors I got to Amazon germany, while US-visitors to Amazon US, etc… And I want to do that by redirecting them to a specific built of that template (which shall actually consist of a small header setting the locale-config and then including a common part (module))…

If this is unclear, I’ll be happy to explain that in more detail via mail…

christoph

It seems that the sourceforge mailing lists are down.

I was wondering if there was a way to make your wishlist links to where if the item was purchased you’d get it instead of the person who clicked…

Thanks, Halla

I would like to see integration with a “Now Playing” plugin. My blog shows the last 15 songs I’ve listened to, but I can’t integrate it with MTAmazon (as far as I can see) because the keywords needed to search come from an XML file.

yes.. what halla said! It seems a little odd that in a wishlist display the link is to the item itself, and not to your wishlist.

Unfortunately Amazon doesn’t provide a way to link to your wishlist in that way.

I’ve been using MTAmazon in conjunction with Bookqueue for a few months now, thanks for a great plugin. This week I’ve run into a problem with getting my site to validate as XHTML 1.0 Trans though, and the problem seems to be the Amazon links… As far as I remember, I did not have this problem before… has Amazon changed the way they build links? is there anyway to get properly validating XHTML 1.0 Trans links again?

Thanks for any help.

Ok, found a fix with the help of the kind people at the MT support forums:

http://www.movabletype.org/support/index.php?s=4cc57d0367bd84c27763663898e47e3f&act=ST&f=20&t=26003&st=0&#entry118722

All validates again!

How about very short amazon links as described here: http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/388

This would just make the code a bit less cluttered…

Currently I use this code to display movies that I have just seen on my site:

MTAmazon method=”Keyword” search=”[MTEntryTitle]” line=”dvd”

Since the films are currently in the theater, they don’t have ASIN numbers yet as DVDs. Luckily this works for new releases (since Amazon now has movie tickets for sale). So, I do a keyword search under DVDs and cross my fingers that the first result is teh one I want. And this usually works for archiving as well, because the keyword search still functions once the movie’s DVD is released.

The only problem is sometimes the movie I want is not the first result of the keyword search. I want this to work for new releases and older DVDs, as well as degrading the new releases to the DVDs…all without maintenance. It works now about 90% of the time.

Is there a better way to do it? Is there something possible with the new Amazon implementations or what you have planned with MTAmazon 3.0 that would make this function the way I want?

I know this may not be on-topic, but I was wondering if we could get someone to make a similar plug-in for mt that tied into imdb? so that you might search for actors and movies in a similar way as mtamazon does.

My wish:

MT-style date formatting of theatrical release dates along with the regular item release dates. I can do “MTAmazonReleaseDate format=”%B %e, %Y”” now.. I want to also be able to do “MTAmazonField name=”TheatricalReleaseDate” format=”%B %e, %Y”” or the equivalent.

Carol O took the words right outta my mouth with regards to formatting the TheatricalReleaseDate (can we make that its own tag?). Also, I’ve noticed that when searching within the dvd line, I can fetch a Director’s name by navigating the XML tree, but for some reason can’t seem to fetch Actors’ names. Could be an amazon bug. Anyway, shouldn’t this be a similiar subroutine to what already exists with MTAmazonArtists? If so, can we also add MTAmazonDirector and MTAmazonActor tags to the version 3.0 wishlist?

Could you make this work with amazon.co.uk as well as .com (and I suppose amazon.de etc…). I can’t see it being to hard…

Would be nice to be able to talk about books and let users buy off the amazon of thier choice!

The current plug in is great (even if it sometimes throws up strange errors on a rebuild). I would like to echo all those who want different country specific searches (and if possible a way to display the best choice automatically for a user). I would also love to see a feature that looks to see if any of the following words are in the MTEntrytitle: ‘dvd’, ‘cd’, ‘book’, ‘film’ etc and then allowed you to restict results to the appropriate category on Amazon. This would be useful for me as I have DVD and Music reviews and would prefer to offer the DVD of ‘Superfly’ if it is a film review and the CD if it is a music review.

Will the new web services allow you to extract the new priority data from a wishlist? It would be great to exclude stuff I mark ‘do not buy for me.’

How about the ability to link to Amazon.ca instead (or even better, in addition to) amazon.com?

I’m trying to set up MTAmazon for a list of books that I’ve read.

I’m trying to set it up to take the MTEntrykeywordfrom the entry for a specific category, but all it gives me is a blank page:

” align=”left” border=”0” hspace=”5” />

What am I doing wrong?

As long as it still works with BookQueue I am happy! Love you guys for what you do!

I thought there was a version of this that worked with amazon.co.uk?

Is there a version which works together with Amazon Germany. I was not able to find anything in the documentation. Appreciate any help. http://www.naturelich.com/archives/2005/02/mtamazonandbo.html

It would be really nice if there was some sort of functionality for dealing with books that have no images associated with them on Amazon, like defining a placeholder image, or something like that.

Hi.

I apreciate your efforts of developing plugin like MTAMezon. I required such web service plugin for my site. But my requirement is like. user should be able to shop and pay from my site only. There should not be any Amezon page displyed to the user, not even for payment. Please tell me can your plugin meet all these requirements?

If you wish to provide it at commercial basis then also thats fine for me.

Please let me know about this by mail.

Thanks Alpesh

I LOVED MTAmazon, and a few people told me it was one of their favourite things about my blog… (not sure what that says about the rest of my blog but anyway.) However, in rebuilding recently, I discovered that my ISP no longer support f(open). for security reasons. They recommend using curl instead. A couple of other ISPs appear to be going the same route. This doesn’t really mean much to me as I am by no means a programmer, but I would love it if somehow it was made compatible again. I am using it with Bookqueue too.

It would be great to have more paramters… i.e. heavy or lite, AWS 4.0 or AWS 3.0 request.

Can’t wait to use MTAmazon 3.0