Amazon plugin

Download. You can get MTAmazon by downloading MTAmazon.zip.

Requirements. In order to use MTAmazon, you’ll need to be running Movable Type 2.21 or later and have three Perl modules installed: XML::Simple, LWP::UserAgent, and HTTP::Request. All three are common modules, so there’s a good chance your server has them installed. If they aren’t already on your server, you can download and install them by copying them to Movable Type’s extlib directory.

Installation. Once you’ve downloaded and unzipped MTAmazon.zip, connect to your FTP server and open the directory where you have Movable Type installed.

Create a directory there called plugins if there isn’t one already and copy amazon.pl to the plugins directory.

Using MTAmazon. Once you’ve installed MTAmazon, You’ll have a set of new Movable Type tags.

<MTAmazon></MTAmazon> is a pair of tags that connect to Amazon, runs your search, and builds a list of products. All of the other MTAmazon plugin tags will go inside this pair of tags.

To build your search, you’ll need an Amazon associate ID. You’ll also need to choose whether you want MTAmazon to search for products or display all of the products from an Amazon product category. Lastly, you’ll need to choose which of Amazon’s product lines you want the products to come from.

Searching. If you want to search for products, all you need to do is create a list of search keywords. You can use multiple keywords separated with spaces.

Using Product Categories. To use product categories, you’ll need Amazon’s Browse ID for the category you wich to display. To get the Browse ID, start browsing for products on Amazon. Once you’ve gotten to the category you want to display, look in the address bar of your browser. You’ll see something like http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/408126/ref=br_dh_1_dah/002-8226029-7182418. The browse ID for this category (DVD Awards) is highlighted in bold. The portion you’ll need is the number after browse/-/.

Product Line. The product line is the section of the store that you want to retreive products from, like books or software. Amazon has a list of valid product lines listed on their Associates site. Their list shows the line as "mode=books," but all you need is the "books" portion.

Once you have all your information, you are ready to build your product links using the following attributes to <MTAmazon>:

• associateid
  Your Amazon Associate id


• method (required)
  How do you want to retreive products? You can use either "search" or "browse."


• search (required)
  The search terms or browse id you would like to use. Multiple search terms can be separated with spaces.


• line (required)
  The product line that you are searching or browsing. Valid lines can be found on Amazon’s site.


• lastn
  The number of products you wish to display. Amazon allows a maximum of 15 products, so setting this number to 1 or above will have no effect. If you don’t include the lastn attribute, 15 products will be returned.

Available tags. Inside the <MTAmazon></MTAmazon> container any of the following tags can be used:

<MTAmazonTitle>
The product’s name or title.

<MTAmazonASIN>
The Amazon product ID.

<MTAmazonAuthor>
For books, the author; for movies, the lead actor; for msuic, the artist; for mos everything else, the manufacturer.

<MTAmazonImage>
The URL for the full-size product image.

<MTAmazonSmallImage>
The URL for the thumbnail product image.

<MTAmazonSalePrice>
Amazon’s price. If this is blank, it means that Amazon’s price is so low that it can’t be advertised. A shopper must actually add the product to their Amazon.com shopping cart before seeing it’s price.

<MTAmazonListPrice>
The manufacturer’s suggested, or list, price.

<MTAmazonReleaseDate>
The date that the item was released. You can use MT’s date tag formatting to format this the way you would like. None of the dates include times, so if you use any time values in your formatting, the time is treated as 12:00 am. Some Amazon products do not have a day of the month included with the release date, so even if your date format specifies a day, it won’t be shown for those products.

<MTAmazonAvailability>
The product availabilty.

<MTAmazonLink>
The link to the product. This includes your Associate id, so if someone purchases you’ll get credit for the sale.

Example.

<MTAmazon associateid="kalsey-20" method="search" search="dogs" line="books" lastn="10">

    <p><a href="<MTAmazonLink>">

    <img src="<MTAmazonSmallImage>" align="left" border="0"><MTAmazonTitle>

    </a><br>

    <MTAmazonReleaseDate format="%B %e, %Y"><br>

    <MTAmazonAuthor><br>

    Price: <MTAmazonSalePrice></p><br clear=all>

</MTAmazon>

See it. Visit these sites to see MTAmazon in action:

• Political Wire

License. Like our other freeware, this plugin is released under the open-source MIT License. In plain English, that means you can do whatever you want with the software, including modifying it, selling it, or eating it, but we’re not responsible for anything that goes wrong.

Revision History
1.0 - July 14, 2002
Initial public release