Amazon module (or plugin)?

There was that newer one that used ESC-4.0 but it required PHP-5 which none of the hosts had updated to yet. Don’t know if that is still around or not or if hosts have now updated. I know EngineHosting was waiting on RedHat..

Hmm, good point. I think I do have php 5 now. However, that plugin does look long abandoned too, which could be an issue. I wonder if anyone has it working.

I’m kind of surprised that there isn’t one that is actively updated or even maintained by EE since so many blogs have their current reading or favorite books in their side bars and most are tied to Amazon. Would seem to be almost a standard feature.

I received the Amazon notification as well - and for the particular site, PHP 5 still isn’t an option.

Totally agree with PXLated: An Amazon plugin or module that is actively maintained would be a very good addition for EE. In addition, the abandoned ones (at least for PHP 4) had only limited options and weren’t using all possibilities the ECS gives.

Anyone knowing ECS and raising hands? I’d even spend a few bucks for a solution that works well with the Amazon-DE catalog, ECS 4.0 and PHP 4. Perhaps others would follow?

-Markus

I agree that it would be really nice to have an Amazon application as an official module or plugin since it is so commonly used in blogs.

Last time I had issues with the old plugin, I tried to do something with Amazon’s RSS feed-like output and Magpie, but not being able to define new fields in Magpie meant it was of limited usefulness. But it may be that a module (or plugin) would work better using that interface than the regular ECS interface.

There was a very nice module in progress for a while (I still have a beta of it in installed), but as far as I know it was never finished up. Not sure if this could be something that someone else could get permission to take over.

Important features (for me, anyway) is being able to use multiple locales and being able to control the URLs that are generated since Amazon occasionally changes the preferred format.

Has anyone heard of anything new being worked on? Getting closer to the point where the old plugin won’t be functioning any more.

Nothing I’ve seen…still kind of surprises me.

It’s particularly interesting that nothing has come of this seeing as it appears that at one time Ellis Lab’s had plans to support the Google and Amazon.com APIs. Here’s a quote from a 2004 article at Robin Good’s site where they spoke with Rick:

8) What about integration of Amazon books and other lists? We plan to support the Amazon and Google APIs. Our goal is to make EE as compelling and feature-rich as possible, so you’ll see support for these things in the not-to-distant future.

Obviously this fell off the table, but with any luck perhaps we can coax them into adding support for it into ExpressionEngine 2?

Good find Les ! ! ! Ummmm…Rick, got any new thoughts?

Guys, we cannot develop every single thing. If there was a real demand, then a third party developer would likely step up and make it.

Looking at the number of blogs (not necessarily just EE powered) that makes use of Amazon associate links, I am certain this is something a lot of people would find very useful. However, most of them are probably hobby users rather than commercial users, which I suspect affects the lack of interest from third-party developers.

For my own part, its an important enough feature of my (hobby) site that I don’t currently know how to continue using EE (at least for those parts of my site) once the existing plugin becomes obsolete.

You could always pay someone to develop it for you. Developers create add-ons not only based on the market needs, but also based on what people ask them for directly, as this particular topic may simply not be of personal interest to a plugin author. Many third-party developers will develop one-off add-ons at decent rates when the agreement is such that they retain distribution rights, so instead of completely buying an add-on, you are just paying for the initial development cost. And from the looks of this thread, there’s potential for even that small fee to be split four ways. 😉

That’s partly why I mentioned hobby vs commercial. Now, I don’t have a good idea of what these things do cost, admittedly, but my budget for the site is pretty much limited to the yearly EE renewals. Perhaps I am thinking it would be much more expensive than it actually would be, but when you don’t really make anything off a site (associate earnings are far from large and tied up in gift certificates, for example), it doesn’t take too much for the cost to become too high. 😊

I’m debating trying out my limited PHP skills on coming up with an Amazon plugin myself, but it appears it might actually be easier to craft some of the links by hand than to put the effort into writing the PHP code.

Still kicking it around. 😉