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

I believe there *may* be a small error in the tutorial which I am checking out now.

You have to have a slight grasp of how a PHP file fits together to be able to modify them. Usually most of these errors occur when you have rogue whitespace outside your <?php ?> tags and so on.

It’s *VERY* important in the amm_extras.php file that there is absolutely NO whitespace (THat is, empty lines, spaces or suchlike) between sections of PHP.

Go through your file, make sure this is the case and try again.

If you’re still having trouble, contact me through my website and send me a zipfile with your amm_extras.php file in. I’ll then help you sort it out.

I like this plug in very much but is there a way to create rows instead of columns (or both)? Here’s a couple of pages in action that would work better if they could be two (or more) columns instead of one.
https://archshrk.com/archshrks-dvd-library/
https://archshrk.com/what-to-read/

Fantastic plugin – I love how flexible it is! Now if only I could bend the templates to my will…I’ve got them doing mostly what I want to, it’s just a matter of tweaking.

By the way, I noticed the imageLink(x) makes it a square image. This results in unsightly whitespace around the image if it’s not on a white background. Could there be a way to make x specify the width or the height, but not both?

I’ve also got the row question – I have mine working in rows but I’m not sure how to make it wrap at a specified number of cells per row. I could see a sort of foreach-type statement doing something like that, maybe – “for every four items, make a new row” – does that make sense?

Hi, this was a similar post earlier regarding this. I can’t write PHP at all. But I have got AMM to work. This is what I’ve got so far. I’ve tried the following calls in posts (as quicktags).

<!–amm_getMediaID(‘amm_my_first_go’,2)–>
AND
<!–amm_getMedia(‘amm_my_first_go’,3, AMM_ALL, AMM_DATE_DESC, AMM_RATING_ALL)–>

Now this is what I get – the results return, correctly, as follows:

Dervla Murphy, One Foot in Laos
AND
Steph Park-Pirie (Editor), Once Upon a Rhyme, London
Dervla Murphy, One Foot in Laos
Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan

= = = = = = = =

Question
1) The results only list the books but not the links to Amazon. I would like to link the Title to Amazon.

2) Also I would like to have a small picture to go with with the author and title.

I’ve looked at function reference but am not sure how to to apply them for posts and pages.

Can you point me in the right direction? Thanks.

Should have answered this sooner. Unfortunately my site is down but the sample ‘amm_my_first_go’ does not include an image. Try this

<?php
function amm_my_first_go($amm){
?>
<?php for ($x = 0; $x < $amm->totalItems(); $x++ ) :?>
<?php echo $amm->imageLink();?>
<img src="<?=$amm->autoImage('medium);?> />
<strong>Title: </strong> <?php echo $amm->title();?>
<strong>Author: </strong> <?php echo $amm->author();?>

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

<?php
return $content;
}
?>

One of those two lines will work.

Sorry for not responding sooner, I’ve been sick in bed for a good number of days now and have only just managed to get back to my computer.

Archshrk : Putting the results into columns would be a challenge for the CSS you use on the output page, rather than something you’d control strictly with the template. However, you COULD control it to some extent in your output template function as follows:

In the output loops provided and explained in the AMM, only one item is output in each iteration of the loop. There’s nothing stopping you using the NextItem() function to move on and output 2 items in each iteration, allowing you to build rows of 2. You would have to do some checking to make sure you didn’t output the last item twice in the case of an odd number of results though. (Due to NextItem() staying at the end if it’s already at the end.)

I will check to make sure the recordset functions return true or false values to make this testing easier and will upload new source to the website later.

Another approach would be simply to echo each book into its own DIV, then style it into two columns using CSS (Float all the book divs left and give them a width, then put them in a container DIV that’s twice as wide… Bingo, 2 columns.)

etoile:

There are several ways Amazon lets you format images and I picked the one that would be the most “rounded”.

However if you want to modify the behaviour (I agree in retrospect that the white borders are a bit ugly!!) then you want to look at lines 506->520 in amm_output.php

You should see there how the amazon image URL’s are built.
Look along the lines for :


._AA' . $size . '_.jpg';


And change the AA to SY if you want a fixed height and SX if you want a fixed width.

Check out this page for more information:

https://aaugh.com/imageabuse.html

Thanks archshrk!

It does indeed list the books with images. Although the page is coming down slow (from Amazon, I think).

Also <em>(this for the benefit of other newbies and non-programmers like myself ;-)</em> there’s a couple typos in the second line of your given code; it produces a Parse Error in …/plugins/amm/amm_extras.php

The typos are a couple missing quotes –
1) single quote after the word medium
2) double quote after the php closing tag ?>
The correct syntax is as follows

<strong><img src="<?=$amm->autoImage('medium');?>" /></strong>

Also, the above line only displays the book, title and image – it doesn’t link to Amazon. The line below, however, will link to Amazon through the image.

<strong><?php echo $amm->imageLink();?></strong>

What’s more, I now understand better how and where those functions are referenced! Thanks so much!

archshrk, I tried to check your page and got a “Server not Found”…
Please let me know when it’s back online.

Sorry, my site’s server is down (again).
Powweb has been having issues since yesterday.
updates: https://forum.powweb.com/showthread.php?t=57107

Well, it looks like https://www.archshrk.com is back online so please feel free to visit. For your convenience, here are the two pages that feature the plugin…
https://archshrk.com/archshrks-dvd-library/
https://archshrk.com/what-to-read/

For obscure reasons, AMM is sometimes (always?) returning and displaying the “interior” image. For example, I recently tried to add a book with this ISBN number to my database: 0060191449. It properly located the book, but it gave me the following image: https://images.amazon.com/images/P/0060191449.01.IN01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Obviously, it should have given me this:

https://images.amazon.com/images/P/0060191449.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

The only change I have made to your code is one which you suggested above: in amm_output.php, I commented out the following line:

// if ( $imageinfo === FALSE ) $image = $this->currentItem[‘amm_smallImageURL’];

Any idea why I’m getting this behavior?

Oh, and in case it matters, I am using imageLink to ask for the large version of the image in my template.

My explaination of this is as follows:

We store the thumbnail returned in the amaon result set in the database as a fallback.

For some reason, the image returned in the amazon XML request is the internal image, not the cover image. This may be due to a change with amazon’s web service, we’re looking into it right away.

hi,
I have a feeling this plug in is great… I love the interface, BUT… all I can follow so far is to do one change in the extras.php file and then I am lost. Let’s assume here that php and I are NOT friends. I have some experience but what I want to do is creat a simple page to list something… can you help me out with starting at the very beginning?? If I wanted to creat a simple page, not worried about what it will look like, I just want to be able to SEE it…