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Nov
16
Amazon Showcase Wordpress Widget
Filed Under General
I’m proud to announce one of my first code releases:
Amazon Showcase Wordpress Widget
Amazon Showcase is a Wordpress Widget for showcasing items from Amazon. Simply enter the ASIN/ISBN number of any product and optionally enter an Associate ID for earning commissions. The product image will be displayed with a link to the product detail page on Amazon.com.
This widget was born out of my own need for a simple way to add Amazon products to my sidebar. As you can see, I am using it to display the book that I am currently reading. Amazon Showcase makes use of Amazon’s Web Services, Representational State Transfer (REST) and a little PHP XML parsing magic to grab products from their catalog dynamically.
So enjoy, and please offer feature requests, I plan on expanding this widget in the near future!
Comments
13 Responses to “Amazon Showcase Wordpress Widget”
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Currently Reading
Superb, thank you. I was just about to write something like this myself and now you’ve saved me alot of trouble. Particularly as I’m not really comfortable with PHP. I have a request, could it be possible to have multiple items in the future? Or is it possible to get WordPress to let me drop more than one instance in the sidebar?
Stuart,
I had planned on adding support for multiple items. There will be another release soon that will include this feature. Do you have any suggestions on how you see it working?
feel free to delete previous empty comment, lol.
what I have been looking for and am amazed no one has really put out yet is a widget that will allow one to display what one is currently reading, listening to, watching, playing, etc. sure, there are ways of doing this with cg-amazon, but who wants to have to edit templates, etc? especially now that we have widgets?!
in either case, it looks like you have put out something far neater than the “now reading” widget.
I love this widget!
I am having problems with the layout (only because I don’t understand it).
How would I go about having the images layout horizontally - with a few pixels in between - instead of vertically?
Nay,
I would recommend putting the following CSS rule in your theme’s stylesheet:
.amzshcs-item { float: left; width: 75px; }
Play with the value of ‘width’ to achieve the desired spacing.
Enjoy!
Aaron
i did everything as per the instructions and activated the plugin in the admin panel, but i dont get the options page at the manage section nor is it available in the presentation page. Do you know what i should do? I tried both old and new versions of the widgets. No luck. Please help me.
Aaron,
I recently added your widget to my sidebar at http://www.timothymcauliffe.com/blog and was wondering how you can list the items in several rows instead of one row straight down. This would look a lot better on the site. I’m not very familiar with code but I can find my way around a bit, if you could let me know how to change this it would be great. And, as was previously mentioned, having multiple items (books, music, movies, etc.) would be an incredible feature!
Thanks
Aaron — great plugin! I used the directions you gave to Nay above to resize and it worked exactly like I hoped. However, it seems to have interfered with my flickr badge and is throwing it completely off the sidebar — out in right field. Any suggestions for counteracting that effect?
I should also note: the issue is only in Firefox.
This is a wonderful idea!
after fussing and fussing with the Amazon wishlist and Amazon workflow plugins, I came across this after doing a google search for a better idea.
I am seriously considering replacing my current amazon wishlist plugin with this one instead.
I’ve had a rough time trying to find an amazon wishlist plugin that will display on the sidebar, and this looks promising
Is there any way to make it a text link instead of an image? Great plugin!
Thanks
Aaron,
Thank you so much for this, to add to those above… if a v2 added “now reading/watching and listening” type categories, it would be perfect!
Thank you
Great widget! Thank you Aaron!
Two things I’d like to ask:
- it would be great to be able to have multiple Amazon Showcase widgets (e.g. one for “currently reading”, one for “recently finished books”, maybe one for “all time favourite books” and so on) , but I don’t know if this is possible?
- any idea why a book shows up with no image, but only the title of the book as text? The book has an image on the amazon site.