NEW! Amazon Media Manager 1.5 (*Finally!*)

These are the kinds of things we’ll be adding to the next version but, hey, we’ve gotta pay the bills before we can work on free stuff so patience is a virtue. (I say this a lot, the fact we have over 2,000 download and approximately 5 links kinda knocks your enthusiasm for constant development… :))

Anyway, the easiest way to achieve what you want is to use one of the redundant fields. For example, “Manufacturer” is never used for books.

Thus, you can simple throw into that field any identifiable string you like, or a number (1 would do, for current) and then in your output stage, simple grab the manufacturer and test to see if it’s current or not.

EG:

if ($amm->manufacturer == ‘1’) { // display }

Ok, so it’s not ideal, but it’s a reasnoble compromise…

We have a laundry list of things to and this is one of them, so keep your eyes open for updates!

I got it working. I compliment you on your easy to understand code! I did it the “the hard way” because I wanted it to be a bit cleaner and easier to use. I added a new column to the table to hold if the item was “current” or not. I added new columns to the admin UI to show if an item as current and to toggle it:

https://ewal.net/stuff/amm.png

The end result is that my “current” items appear in my sidebar:

https://ewal.net/

And the full list is here:

https://ewal.net/diversions/

I am looking forward to keeping a record of the books I go through and maybe even rating and reviewing a few of them.

Thanks for the great plugin.

P.S. Let me know what email you’d like me to email my modifications to (if you’d like to see them, that is).

Hi Ed,

Glad you got it working, and glad you appreciate the code commenting ??

It would be great if you could email me the modified files, I’ll take a look over them and when I get round to version 2.0 if they’re OK I’ll charge right ahead and use it!

Contact me by email through https://www.sozu.co.uk

Thanks in advance!

ed, how did you make the full list look/work like it does?
I’d love to have an image-free, linkable list of all my items (DVD, Books) but without all the hand coding. Thanks.

https://archshrk.com/archshrks-dvd-library/
https://archshrk.com/what-to-read/

Hi there archshrk!

To get a categorised list of linked items a-al ed,you ned a custom template. Yes, it involves hand coding but no, it’s not that bad.

Looking at Ed’s site he’s probably making 2 calls to AMM, one to get the book and one to get the DVDs.

The template will look like this:


function amm_item_list($amm){
?>

<ul>
<?php for ($x = 0; $x < $amm->totalItems(); $x++ ) :?>

<li><a href="<?php echo $amm->url(); ?>"><?php echo $amm->title();?></a>, <?php echo $amm->autoAuthor(); ?> <small>(Added: <?php echo $amm->date('d M, Y'); ?>)</small></li>

<?php $amm->nextItem(); endfor; ?>
</ul>
<?php
}

You would then call this function from within your page or template like so:


<strong>Books:</strong>
<?php amm_getMedia('amm_item_list',0,AMM_BOOKS); ?>


Naturally, if you then want to list CD’s, make a getmedia call for CDs.

As of this time, there is no built-in provision for sorting on any field. It’s an easy hack to make though, and provision for sorting on all fields WILL be part of the next minor release which we’re working on soon.

Hope this is of some help, if not, contact me via email.

(You only get such a long answer because you’re actually one of the few people linking through!!)

Works like a charm, thanks!
As for the link-through, it was totally waranted. While I’ve only sold 6 items (4 that I bought) just having the feature is very handy. And sorting is low priority for me right now but will be nice to see when it’s ready.

Now all I have to do is work on the two-column issue and I’ll be a happy camper.

I think you misunderstand… I mean you have a link to the AMM website on your page, which sadly very very few people using the plugin do ??

*accidental double post*

Actually, I understand – you were refering to the giant flashing banner on the bottom of the pages I list my DVDs and BOOKs on. I also have a small icon link on my sidebar. I felt it was the least I could do since your plugin is so useful for me. Too bad people can’t be bothered to support products they use.

Banners, or buttons, or just plain “This blog’s using the AMM”… All are just as good as the other! (And certainly all more useful than nothing!)

Thanks for the support,
Den

This is a great plugin, I’ve found it really useful on my site. I’ve written some new functions that work in conjunction with the existing AMM code that I think a lot of people will find incredibly useful. Here is what they do:

It gets an image from amazon, creates a jpg thumbnail of a specified size from it, and saves that thumbnail in a user-specified directory. Note that when I say a specified size I mean that you are not restricted to the same aspect ratio as the original image — you can create square thumbnails, for example, which is what I do. The script crops the image appropriately so that the image is not distorted. The filename for each thumbnail is unique because it is just the ASIN.

In creating the thumbnail, the code tries to create the thumbnail from a ‘medium’ sized amazon image first, then, if that is not found it tries to find the ‘large’ size image and create the thumbnail from that — this can be particularly helpful because for certain items Amazon does not correctly serve images of a certain size (this happened to me for a pearl jam cd that was not available at the ‘medium’ size)

So the first time my function is called, it creates the thumbnail and returns the appropriate URI for the image — any time after that, it figures out that the thumnail has already been created, and just returns the URI.

The reasons I wrote this extra code are:

(1) It allows for prettier displaying of images if you want to display them in a format that requires specific size and aspect ration, which I need on my website
(2) It is pretty robust against bugs in amazon’s api (like the one i experienced with the pearl jam cd)
(3) It speeds things up a _lot_ (after the thumbnail has been created once).

Point 3 is essential for certain situations.. I have a page where I display all of the music CDs i have in AMM (https://barunsingh.com/randomness/music) — without caching the image covers it takes over 2 minutes to load that page, whereas with the caching it loads very quickly.

If there is any demand for this extra functionality, please let me know. After I clean up the code a bit, I can post it on my website for people to download.. Denyerec — if you want, I can also send it to you to incorporate (with appropriate modifications) into a future release of AMM?

Amazon Associates is beta testing a new preview feature. By adding a script to your site all basic links

‘https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/INSERT_ASIN_HERE/archshrkcom-20&#8217;
have a preview mouseover effect. Will AMM be incorporating this?

Hi there,
Barunio I would be very interested in incorporating the changes into the next release, as local caching is something we’ve toyed with but not implemented.

I will be in touch via email!

Archshrk – as I said to Barunio in an email, we have an intermediate release planned, as soon as we make enough money to take some time off from the real world we’ll get on the case (And yes, we’ll be incorporating that!)

Sorry for not responding sooner. I got distracted by real life. I sent you an email denyerec with a URL where you can get my modified AMM files if you are curious to look at them.

archshrk, I do almost exactly what denyerec suggested in his reply to your question about how I got my list to look like that. Also, I just turned on the preview mouseover on my site and I didn’t have to do anything to AMM, I just had to add the required javascript to my wordpress footer (and I made sure my amazon URLs were in the standard format). I’m not sure I’ll keep it there, though ?? I’m not really trying to market my amazon links (I just like having the list for the sake of having the list) and the hover preview thing makes things look a little bit commercial.