The WP Advertising Associate plugin (WPAA for short) allows you to quickly and easily integrate Amazon Products and Widgets into your website, enabling you to monetize your website through Amazon’s Associate program. The plugin provides content editor support for searching and inserting amazon product and images, content replacement of static amazon links with your defined associate tag, as well as support for inserting Amazon Widgets through WordPress Short Code, Widget Administration, or PHP code.
WPAA fully supports amazon localization to the following supported markets: Canada (CA), China (CN), Germany (DE), Italy (IT), France (FR), Japan (JP), Spain (ES), United Kingdom (GB), and the United States (US).
The WP Advertising Associate plugin is designed to be your all inclusive source for enriching your website with Amazon products and Widgets embedded with your own Associate Tag. Please visit the downloads page to get it for yourself today or install through the Plugins panel of your WordPress powered website by searching for WPAA. You can learn more about the plugin by viewing detailed information on it’s supported features.
If you need help or have questions regarding the plugin don’t hesitate to post a comment or visit the WordPress Plugin Support Forums.
Hey there! Are you still supporting this plugin? There isn’t nearly enough quality versions of this plugin out there. Please keep it up!
Hi there,
For some reason the geolocalizer is no longer working… I’m in the UK but I’m getting USA always…
Hello,
This is no longer available on the WP extension directory. I have version 2.0 – has there been a new version released?
thanks
Blaise
Hey,
I am not sure if you could check this comment, but if you do…
I wanted to ask now that amazon.in is active and have an affiliate system, I was wondering if you could add India under ‘Amazon Locale’ just as you did for other countries. I am sure a lot of people will appreciate it :).
Thank for your time!
Currently India locale is limited to India residents. I’m going to research this further but without ability to sign-up and interact with the promotions and functionality I wouldn’t be able to fully support.
For the time being I won’t be adding support for India.
Shortcodes for Amazon products are no longer working; is there an update coming soon?
I’m still getting missing links for various products, though it seems like there is no rhyme or reason of why some work and some don’t. Has there been any progress on a fix yet?
Has there been any update as to the reason for missing links?
nice plugin and i am enjoying it.thanks
Hi,
Entered access keys, but get the message:
Code: RequestExpired
Message:
Request has expired. Timestamp date is 2012-10-08T08:49:24Z.
Done all the Amazon side stuff ?
Tim
Tim:
The above message means that your webserver’s time setting is out of sync. You need to contact your hosting provider and have them update the server to the correct time. If they don’t resolve the issue let me know and I can send you some code to patch the issue, however it isn’t optimized which is why I haven’t included it in with the plugin code.
Many thanks. I have gone into my Plesk Panel and corrected this (the site is running on a VPS). Key codes now validated.
I am gonna give it a try. I haven’t had any luck with “betterAmazonAPI” or “Amazon Link”. Actually your plugins feature that allows you to verify your access keys allowed me to use the “betterAmazonAPI” again. Thanks!!!
Love the widget. One question though: Is it possible to get more than 12 resources to list on my page without the user having to go to another page? I have 13 resources and it feels awkward to have all by itself on a second page. I’d like to get it on the first page. How do I do that?
Never mind. Figured it out. It was in the HTML. Thanks!
My website is not live as yet. I have the widget activated and am trying to add the Amazon Carousel widget. It displays fine but is there a way to have displayed exactly the items I want? I cannot get the keywords box to work, I’m blocked out. I can create my own carousel at Amazon.com’s API page but have no where to place the code. Help?
Thanks!
Mike to display your own custom products you need to change the Widget Type option. If you have a list of ASIN’s then choose “ASIN List”, if you want to use keywords choose “Search and Add”
Thanks Matthew!!
I have installed the plug-in. I entered the HTML code from Amazon for a product on one of my WordPress.org blog pages, in the HTML view. It isn’t showing up on my blog. In the visual view of the page, in the dashboard, I do see a yellow box. But no nice Amazon ad on my user end. Just white space. Can you help me with this please? Thanks!
I found the place on the page where I can insert image, link, enhanced image. Tried this, too; but nothing still shows on the page. Thanks in advance for your help! I’m sure this plugin will be an awesome help once it’s up and running.
Hi, when you insert amazon content it adds it as shortcode to your post/page content in the format of
[amazon_link ...]...[/amazon_link]. If you preview the page/post you will see the shortcode replaced with the actual content from Amazon.I use the plug in to show which releases are coming out each week. I post the DVD covers and then a separate text link underneath. The last two weeks, I’ve noticed that the embed of the cover will work, but the link on the picture and the text link will disappear and just appear as text, even though the appropriate short codes are in place. This seems be happening at random, and I can’t tell what is causing it. At first I thought it was an Amazon.com problem and that the titles didn’t exist or had some problems, but that no longer seems to be the case.
(reposting in case I didn’t comment in the appropriate section)
Hi Zack, sorry you are having issues. Could you try clearing the WPAA Cache? I wonder if a request failed to Amazon then got cached as such. Also could you send me the post/page content from the wordpress admin editor? That way i can test it out in my environments?
Thanks.
Alright, I’ve sent you an email with what I hope is the required info.
Zach, thanks for the details. I’m seeing the same behavior where some of the links aren’t recognized on my test site. I’ll run some tests and see if I can determine the underlying reason.
I’m also seeing this problem and it seems to be random. If I clear the cache and re-load, some of the links won’t be picked up. For a text link, the link is gone and for an image link, it just shows the alternate text.
Clearing the cache multiple times will cause different links/images to be affected each time.
I’ve been looking at this issue and it doesn’t appear to be related to the cache. It seems like the XML returned from Amazon is different for different items and that the plugin can’t parse the images out.
Take a look at ASIN B005UUYOPM and B000S9RF4M, specifically the ImageSet node in the XML. The second one has the Images at the same level after ItemLinks and before ImageSets, and this one does display the image. For the first, there is no SmallImage, MediumImage, and LargeImage between ItemLinks and ImageSets.
I believe this issue is related to Amazon throttling requests. I had some links that weren’t showing up and I checked the WPAA cache and the result showed that there was an error due to throttling. Does the ignore the entry in the cache if it was an error?
Question: The button for adding a product appears on the Fancy Editor for the bbpress plugin version, as it pulls from WP. Forums don’t run shortcode by default and the button breaks the layout to boot. Is there some way to remove it or keep it from showing up on bbPress? Thanks for any hep you can provide.
Dixie, I’ll take a look at the bbpress plugin and see if there is something that can be done.
Thank you so much, Matthew.
Hello,
Great product – how long until I start to see ads on my site, on average?
Cheers.
Ben, this is not an automatic link service. You need to add the content to your site.
Hello Matthew you genius. Awesome widget. Everything’s working well for the most part. I love the product preview option. I just am hung up on one thing. The powerful Geo Location part that allows you to input your foreign amazon associate account ids. I put them in and update the settings. However it does not take effect. Can you please help me get this awesome tool working. I really appreciate your time.
Alan Craker
Furor.co
Alan, can you elaborate, are you saying links are localizing when visited from other locations?
Thank you, Matthew. The Advertising API Sign-In worked!
Thanks again.
Hello,
I have the same problem. AWS Key is shown as invalid. InternalError
Thank you
Hi Everyone:
It appears that you may need to sign the Product Advertising API agreement for your AWS key to be recognized. Please access the following link and sign-in. This should resolve the issue.
Advertising API Sign-In
I ma still getting the Code: InternalError and InValid when validating the Access Key and Secret Key.
Any workarounds yet?
Why can’t I validate my web services with Amazon? It keeps reading internal error, please try again.
I tried creating a new account but that didn’t work. Any suggestions?
Hi, everyone:
There have been a few posts recently about the “Internal Error” message when validating with Amazon. As it turns out that error message is from Amazon and returned when the service is down for maintenance or unexpected issues. Please let me know if you still receive the error at this time as it should have resolved itself out now.
Thank you,
Matthew
I just installed your plugin and created an AWS account. Upon entering the credentials they are classified as Invalid and I’m getting the following message:
“Code: InternalError
Message:
We encountered an internal error. Please try again.”
I already tried creating new credentials – same effect. Any idea what the reason might be?
I’d really appreciate your help!!!
Thanks a lot!
Sassenach
When I try to validate credentials using an AWS access key and a secret key I am getting ‘InValid’ in red and ‘Code: InternalError’
‘Message:
We encountered an internal error. Please try again.’
I have just installed this plugin and just signed up for an AWS account. I have very little experience with all this stuff so finding it hard to fix by myself.
I just registered for an Amazon AWS account and my access / secret keys are unable to validate? It keeps showing INVALID with this error:
Code: InternalError
Message:
We encountered an internal error. Please try again.
A few times it just shows that “we were unable to authenticate the values” or something of the sort, but for the most part, just that message above. Eagerly waiting your response!
Thank you!
Is anyone else seeing that their requests are getting rejected with a throttling error? This seems to be related to a switch to a new Product Advertising API for affiliates. Has WPAA already made this switch?
FYI for anyone having this problem, creating a new AWS account solved the issue.
Thanks for this comprehensive Amazon plugin.
I notice the ip2nation data is not updating to the most current version. I see you mentioned this in your comments around July 11th.
Any news on a fix for this?
Thanks,
Jonathan
I do have a fix in the code, I haven’t had a chance to release a new Version. Sorry for the delay Jonathan.
Hey Matt, thanks for an awesome plugin! Donating soon.
Is there a way to make the plugin’s Preview popup functionality “fall back” to a specific locale should an ASIN not be found in another locale’s database?
For instance , ASIN B002HJ377A *is* available in the .com and .co.uk locales, and the popup preview displays for those locales. However, that ASIN is not found in amazon.ca. When a reader from Canada hovers over the link, the link target does resolve to the .com domain, but the preview from .com does not display.
It’s an annoyance to be sure, not really a critical feature, but is there any way around this?
Chris, unfortunately at this time there is no fallback behavior for the preview. The script used for that part of the code comes directly from Amazon and I have not gotten around to re-scripting it so that it can handle multiple domains and affiliate tags. It’s been on my to-do list for over a year now unfortunately I just don’t have the time to spend on it as I would like.
Hello,
I want to use Amazon Products on my blog – but I would like to gear it towards golf products – is that possible?
Alan, which features of the plugin are you using. If you are putting product links/images in your post you can search for golf products and inlcude them. If you are using the widgets than you need to select the ASINList option and you can input specific products you want to see in the widgets. I’m trying to find some time to put together a video tutorial on how to configure the different widgets hopefully I get to that soon.
Hi Matthew first thanks for this rockin’ plug in! I am trying to use the mp3 widget, but can’t figure out how to configure it to show mp3’s that I choose – as opposed to the most popular which it is showing now.
If you want to have a look, it’s on the blog tab of my site – any help appreciated. PS Pardon our dust, still redesigning my site ; ) Candy
Candy:
How are you adding the mp3 widget to your site is it through the widget panel or in the post editor. When using the UI to add the widget to the page you need to select “ASIN List” under the Widget Type option. This will allow you to put in a comma delimited list of ASINs. The final source will look similar to :
[amazon_mp3_clips widget_type="ASINList" width="250" height="250" title="" market_place="US" shuffle_tracks="True" max_results="" asin="B000SXLL8O,B0011Z933S" /]I dont understand how to get the links or pics shown in my article.
I tried many different plugins and nothing worked for me so I think I have a general problem of understanding the integration in the post.
With this plugin i tried in the html part and the visual part of my article these things:
[amazon_enhanced asin=”3826691938″ container=”” container_class=”” price=”New” background_color=”FFFFFF” link_color=”000000″ text_color=”0000FF” /] – generated from the plugin – shows nothing
[amazon_enhanced asin=”3826691938″ /] – from the quicklinks window – shows nothing
I made all of the settings for the plugin so it should be ok on that side. Could it be that my general settings for this blog are blocking the plugin?
I tried now for about 4 hours….
Stefan:
Do you use Ad Blocking sofware/plugins for your browser? I took the samples you included in your comment and both are displaying the enhanced amazon ads. As you are able to get the code from quicklinks that means that you have curl enabled and the plugin is able to succesfully connect with the Amazon Product API. I would check if you block ads in your browser and if not a hassle could you send me a link to your site that contains an ad? That way I can access it and see what is being output in the source?
~ Matthew
OMG!
Im so sorry. You are right. I use Adblock for such a long time so I didnt think about that. I deactivated the blocker and everything is fine. So I have to find a solution to display a text for the people that arent seeing the picture. Maybe I will give a link on the text I write by myself.
Thank you very much 🙂
Hello!
I found your plugin – very nice! I am new to this however, perhaps you could provide an explanation. I like the Hover over – image preview with buy it now button. What my concern is, when you hover over the image – the box pops up, which is great… My associate ID only shows when you use the text link, not the “buy now” button? I have entered all the proper keys and id tags. Perhaps there’s an explanation for this?
Thanks
Hi, can you send me a link to your page so I can review what is specifically being set in the image preview code?
Thank you for a great plugin!
I have one issue: I cannot get the Geo Localization to work.
I have enabled Geo Localization in the settings; activated ip2nation; and selected -Geo Locale- in the widget settings.
However, I still see amazon.com books, rather than amazon.co.uk although I’m definitely here in the UK!
Am I missing something? Any help very gratefully received.
James
James:
I checked your ip that was submitted for your comment and ip2nation does recognize it as the United Kingdom. When you select UK does it output amazon.co.uk? I’m looking into the code and will let you know if I find anything that would account for the invalid locale selection.
Thank you,
Matthew
Hi Matthew,
Many thanks for the quick reply. And sorry for my delayed response!
When I select UK, it does indeed link to amazon.co.uk. It seems that it is just the Geo Locale that is not working – evidently due to ip2nation not recognising my IP address.
I have checked my IP address and it is being recognised as UK-based by IP check websites, BBC, Google, etc.
Thanks again for your help with this.
James
P.S. I noticed that the installed version of ip2nation is quite out of date: Sat, 20 Nov 2010 14:20:29
Perhaps this is the problem?
Many thanks,
James
James the plugin should recognize that there is a new version of ip2nation available. Can you try uninstall than re-install. I see as well on my own site that it is showing the old date for the ip2nation install and will see if i can track down why that is as there was a new version earlier this year.
Hi Matthew,
Many thanks for that. I have uninstalled and re-insatlled ip2nation and still seem the same Nov 2010 version…
James
Hi James,
Thanks for pointing this error out to me. Appears I missed a break statement in the ip2nation logic when checking for new versions. I’m at work now and will see if i can push a bug fix later this evening/ tomorrow. I’m still looking into why the widget isn’t showing UK as the uninstall-install would have given you the latest ip2nation database although the timestamp is wrong.
Thanks Matthew, don’t hesitate to email me if you need any further info. I could, for example, send you screenshots of all my settings…
I’m working on this site for a client. Installed the plugin and wanted to add my favorites to a post. WP version 3.3.1.
Have the associate Tag, etc in the settings part.
This is the code I have in the post
[amazon_my_favorites title=”I Recommend” ASIN=”0768429609-1442124997-B003YMMTG4-097934090X”]
Nothing is showing up. Please advise. This is the second plugin I have tried using with no success.
Corinne, sorry for not getting back to you sooner. Time seems to keep flying by. The issue you are facing is that you need to use commas not dashes.
amazon_my_favorites title=”I Recommend” ASIN=”0768429609,1442124997,B003YMMTG4,097934090X”
Love your plugin! If you could ever add support to default the search to post tags that would be amazing for everyone! Thanks again!
Hi Matthew, thanks for providing the update to WPAA! I’m glad to see you’re still supporting it.
I wanted to let you know that I still see a bug in AmazonProduct.php, function image(), line 99 — the space after the comma needs to be removed. At least for me, Amazon product images don’t show up if the space is still there after the comma.
Thanks!
i could offer to help with bugfixing or updating the plugin to the latest version. currently the spanish amazon affiliate page is not supported and the AWS autolinks do not work, since the validation progress seems to be broken. (using wordpress 3.2)
is there an update for the plugin planned? currently the AWS credentials do not work! i think it should not be too hard to get the plugin up and running again! HELP! thanks!
Hi there,
Thanks for the plugin. I have an issue with it though- it seems that Amazon actually uses a different ASIN for the same product across the US and UK stores in some cases. Is there a way around this, or do I have to just put two links in my post?
I know if there will be an update for Italy
Thanks for the plugin. It is awesome!
When do you add the new Spain locale?
Sorry Matthew! I just saw the question had been raised before.
We will be waiting for the upgrade patiently.
Again thanks for your plugin!
I’m a little confused. I just installed WordPress-Amazon-Associate and it’s asking for an secret key and a access key. Upon signing up for AWS it asks me for a credit card number?!?
Why should I have to pay Amazon to put their products on my page? am I missing something? This reminds me of a early 2000 drop shipping site trying to get you to “sign up” on their site with a credit card.
I would like to know how much money has been charged to all your accounts or am I just over reacting.?
I want to instal ip2nation feature in this plugin but it said like this
Error: Failure while downloading remote file form ip2nation, please try to re-install.
What happened with this? Anyone can help me? Thank you.
I don’t want to sound dumb but I recently installed this widget and am getting confused with all the different settings. Do you have to sign up with AWS for it to work properly? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Since last week I’m seeing this error message in the plug-in’s Settings page:
Warning: Quick Links and Product Searches are disabled. To enable please enter your valid AWS Access and Secret Keys
Consequently some pages are linking through to the Amazon homepage, rather than the product page. And any page this occurs on is returning a 500 Error – causing all of the content to not display on the page.
Help!
Anyone else having the problem of the AWS Access Key and Secret Key not validating any more?
Hi there,
If I have ip2nation activated and Enable Geo Localization selected in Settings, but in the actual Amazon search widget there are only options to set a locale (in the dropdown called Marketplace).
Does this dropdown override the geolocation feature, or the other way around?
Do I leave the dropdown set to the default – Geo location – option, or do I need to set a ‘default’ marketplace.
* An option called something like ‘use visitor’s location’ would have been cool here.
The plugin itself is fantastic – many thanks for putting this together – it’s great to work with 🙂
If you can provide some guidance on the markeplace issue I will be very grateful..
Many thanks
Jose
I think I overcomplicated what I was trying to say :/
I want to the plugin to send the visitor to their ‘local’ Amazon, so I want to use geo location.
But, in the widget, I’m asked to select a marketplace.
What do I do?
Have just installed, added my access codes and they validated ok, but get the following warning above the settings page, so cannot get any product searches.
Warning: Quick Links and Product Searches are disabled. To enable please enter your valid AWS Access and Secret Keys
Dear Matthew:
I’m whith Gerrit, great plugin, anxiously waiting the launch of the version for amazon.es
¡¡I hope that Spanish Associate locale will still be on top of your list of upgrades.!!
Hola Matthew, impresionante plugin, estoy con Gerrit, esperando con ansiedad el lanzamiento de la versión para amazon.es
¡¡Espero que la versión Local para los Asociados Españoles siga siendo una prioridad en su lista de actualizaciones!
Hey Matthew. I love this widget! I’m glad it’s available again in WP.
But I’m having a little problem. I checked the forum and didn’t see anyone post about the issue I’m having: Text simply refuses to wrap around an image link.
In the editing window, I click on the image (after inserting the link), choose an alignment and the text wraps around. But when I publish the post, the image will be on the left or right, but surrounded by white space with the text below.
The only thing I can think of is that it has something to do with the container and/or container class fields before you insert the link. But there aren’t any options and no explanation of what can or should be entered there. I’m guessing that’s because this is some basic coding thing everyone should know, but I don’t! (And I’m probably not the only one. Just sayin’.)
Please help. My slight OCD tendencies can’t take it anymore! : )
Hey, I am getting an error that my Amazon Web Services credentials are invalid.
I am running wordpress multi site and only have US enabled in your plugin. Any insight would be appreciated in getting my aws info to work.
PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function curl_init()
in
wp-content/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate/APaPi/AmazonProduct/Request.php on line 188
{LINES OF Request.php referenced}
protected function generateCURL( $url ) {
$ch = curl_init();
Had to enable curl with PHP. I am running my own server with Ubuntu so I issued:
apt-get install curl php5-curl
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart
and it works now!
-Brian
Just a recommendation but you might want to put something in the plugin description that php5-curl is required to run the plugin. For most, it wont matter but some people not using php5-curl on their web servers will definitely have issues running this plugin.
Hello,
I cannot validate my Access or Secret key. Once I click update settings I get a 500 error. Any ideas?
Thanks.
Great plugin, any chance of adding the Spanish Amazon Associate (amazon.es) to this plugin?
Gerrit, I finally got some time to work on the plugin and adding the Spanish Associate locale is on top of my list of upgrades. I hope to release a new version next week with support.
Hi Matthew do you have an ETA for the next release?
HI Matthew — do you have any plans to update the version of ip2nation included with the plugin?
Stuart, Under WP – Amazon settings there is an ip2nation page. On this page you can upgrade to latest versions of ip2nation.
Matthew, where do I find this button? I don’t see it on that page. I only see the information below:
Last Updated: Mon, 02 May 2011 00:11:09
Installed Version: Sat, 20 Nov 2010 13:20:29
Do I need a self hosted blog to make use of this plugin?
You can use this on any WordPress powered website regardless if it is self hosted or on wordpress.com
I put my Access and Secret Key but get InValid anybody can help me out. Thank you.
Edwin, which locales do you have enabled? I have heard others mention a similar problem however I have not been able to duplicate
Hey,
I am having this problem as well. I only have US enabled and primary. I can not save my credentials.
Every time I put them in and verify… it says invalid. If I try and save anyway… it goes to a blank page. IE nothing happens.
Has there been any requests for the ability to look up the current price of an item at Amazon? Or would this be something more appropriate for the APaPi? What’s nice about doing it with WordPress Amazon Associate is it has the product cache.
I just installed this plugin version 1.7.4 onto WordPress 3.2.1. When I activated it I got the following error:
Fatal error: Class ‘DOMDocument’ not found in /var/www/html/atheismtv/blog/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate/APaPi/AmazonProduct/Result.php on line 148
Never mind. After doing
yum install php-xml
I had to restart httpd
service httpd restart
It works fine now.
I’m glad you resolved the issue, please let me know if you have any others.
Hello, I love this plugin, so thank you for creating it. I like it so much, I’m adding it to another one of my sites. However, I noticed it’s no longer in the WP plugin repository. Is there a reason for this?
Also, the latest you have on the downloads page (on this site) is 1.7.1, but when it was in the repository, it came up that it had an update to 1.7.2. No problem, I just put a copy of the plugin from one of my other sites on my new site so I have the most updated version.
Hi Cathy, when i created the 1.7.* version of the plugin I added some code so that I could get actual statistics on how many sites where using the plugin and which versions. After the fact I learned that there are some “guidelines” plugins should not “phone home”. As these guidelines are not published anywhere on the WordPress website I did not learn about them until the plugin was unlisted on the repository and had 2-3 weeks of back and forth with one of the moderators to get the specifics.
The statistics tracking code has been removed however the moderators are not being very responsive about getting the plugin re-listed. The WordPress Amazon Associate plugin should be re-listed any day however I don’t have any control over it at this point. In the mean time I’ll make sure to update the downloads section with the most current version (1.7.4) later today.
Is there any way I can find out if the plugin is encountering an error when contacting Amazon? My [amazon_image] links stopped generating Amazon images. I’m guessing that maybe the IP Address on my shared hosting server is being throttled, but I have no way to see if the API is returning a 503 error. Maybe there’s a debugging switch? Thanks.
Stuart, currently I don’t have any debugging settings for the plugin. If you want to test if Amazon is returning a validation error or product not found return code then you can always use the serlvet/index.php file of the plugin and pass the ASIN of a product.
Example: (site_url)/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate/servlet/index.php?Action=ItemLookup&Id=045146379X
Looking at the response you should be able to see what the API is returning. Please let me know what you find out.
Hi Matthew… It works when I do the servlet as you said, but apparently not within the page with the shortcode. Any other ideas? Maybe a plugin interfering?
Matthew, I did some digging and installed the wp_pear debugger to see what’s going on. The call to getProduct() is getting this message back from the Amazon API. Any clue what could cause this?
[Code] => AWS.InvalidResponseGroup
[Message] => Your ResponseGroup parameter is invalid. Valid response groups for requests include Request, ItemIds, Small, Medium, Large, Offers, OfferFull, OfferSummary, OfferListings, PromotionSummary, PromotionDetails, Variations, VariationImages, VariationMinimum, VariationSummary, TagsSummary, Tags, VariationMatrix, VariationOffers, ItemAttributes, MerchantItemAttributes, Tracks, Accessories, EditorialReview, SalesRank, BrowseNodes, Images, Similarities, Subjects, Reviews, ListmaniaLists, SearchInside, PromotionalTag, AlternateVersions, Collections, ShippingCharges, RelatedItems.
The ResponseGroup for the request looked like [ResponseGroup] => ItemAttributes, Images
I think I found the issue. In AmazonProduct.php, function image(), line 99 (see below)
$response_group = AmazonProduct_ResponseGroup::ITEM_ATTRIBUTES .”, ” . AmazonProduct_ResponseGroup::IMAGES;
A space is being added after the comma between Item Attributes and Images. This seems to not comply with the requirements which says there is not a space between the Response Group items. I removed the space and the [amazon_image] shortcode works again.
I looked through the previous versions of WPAA this year and this hasn’t changed. So the only thing I can think of is that Amazon must have changed their syntax checking.
Stuart:
Thanks for finding the root cause of the error. I’m slightly confused on why this issue is not affecting all users of the plugin however I will make the change to the core logic so that future versions don’t cause you this issue.
8/17 Wanted to put this plugin on my other site, but not avail on WP-read your comment about issue.Any chance to know when will be avialble again?
Thanks
Kala: It is in the works awaiting the plugin repository moderators but hopefully it will be soon.
Nice plugin 🙂
However, I’ve noticed that when using the plugin with WP Super Cache, if say a US user calls the page first, it’s then possble for a UK user to get a cached page with US links instead of UK links.
Any ideas on how to get WP Super Cache to play nice?
Hi Connell:
Unfortunately WP Super Cache is not locale aware if enabled it caches the page per the first vistor as you are aware. To correct the issue the WP Super Cache plugin would have to be modified to save a cache version of the page per locale. Also the mod rewrite option would not be viable as PHP code would need to execute to determine the user’s locale.
I don’t have the time to look into how WP Super Cache would need to be modified at this time however I would suggest you contact them to determine where to start looking if you do want to go down the road of customizing their plugin for locale support.
Best of luck and let me know what you end up doing.
Thanks Matt,
Appreciate the swift reply. Being on a cheap shared hosting solution I suspect I’d benefit more from improved the load times than any potential revenue loss from not having the locale correct in my Amazon links.
I’ll have another play with caching and possibly disable the plugin for now and workaround the issue by manually including locale specific links if approprate.
Still an awesome plugin and will definitely use it if I ever get to the point of being able to afford a decent hosting solution :o)
Thanks again, Connell.
Every time I activate this plug-in my site has a 50/50 chance of sending out a 500 server error but as soon as I disable the plug-in it works 100% of the time.
I have a number of plug-ins activated but this seems to be the only one causing me any issues, are you aware of any conflicting plug-ins at all?
Simon
Simon:
Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. What plugins are you currently using? if you let me know I can review and see if there are any compatibility issues.
Hi Matthew,
I am currently using the following plug-ins.
Akismet v2.5.3
Currently Reading v3.3
Exlude Pages from Navigation v1.9
EZPZ One Click Backup v0.8.2
Health Check v0.2.1
Hyper Cache Extended v0.9.4
Jetpack by WordPress.com v1.1.3
Quizzin v1.01.4
SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam v2.7.4
StatPress Visitors v1.4.2
Visitor Maps and Who’s Online v1.5.6.5
Wordpress Popular Posts v2.1.4
WP-vSphereStats v1.01
WPtouch v1.9.33
None of these plug-ins are particularly new to my site and are updated when updates become available.
I can try testing on another site I have access to to see if it’s a particular plug-in but if you are aware of any incompatibilies that would be great.
Simon
Hi Matthew, I just wondered if you had managed to have a look at my list of addons for compatability issues?
Simon
The plugin is no longer available on wordpress. Where can I download it now?
Natasha, the plugin is once again available on WordPress. You can also download the current and previous versions also on this site on the downloads page.
Great plugin. My only issue is that UK links are returning US Import versions products, rather than the UK versions available.
James, currently the localization is based on the product ASIN id. The UK version of the product has a different ASIN number which is why it picks up the US Import version. I have it as a to-do item to allow for having different products (ASINs) for different locations.
Any word on the 2.0 release, or the product switching to relevant country/non-import product?
Hi,
I have just installed this plugin and added my US associate tag, also added access, secret key and got valid but still i receive this error “Quick Links and Product Searches are disabled. To enable please enter your valid AWS Access and Secret Keys” and can’t able to use this plugin.
Help me out from this.
Thanks,
Hello, thanks again for your great plugin. The localization settings feature is a great addition, but I wanted to let you know that some locales are returning an error. When I change to using CN or IT, I get the message “Warning: Quick Links and Product Searches are disabled. To enable please enter your valid AWS Access and Secret Keys” below the “Settings successfully updated.” message. I don’t get this error for any other locales.
Sorry I now see that those localizations aren’t ready yet…
Stuart, Italy has become available. Once I get the plugin re-listed on WordPress I’ll make the necessary update.
Hello
The following error when I disable Product Cache :
Fatal error: Call to a member function isSuccess() on a non-object in /wp-content/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate/AmazonProduct.php on line 62
I find the Product Cache enable, create script http://www.assoc-amazon.com/s/link-enhancer?tag=kig-20&o=1 at the end, can cause slow loading web pages, with a what makes it faster, I tried disabling the Product Cache, plz help
Jenny, thanks for bringing this to my attention I’ll review and make updates accordingly to resolve.
Got this error when trying to activate. What does it mean?
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in /home/content/i/r/s/irsmun/html/BTT/wp/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate/WPAA.php on line 48
Gary, the plugin requires PHP 5. The above error is thrown when it is activated on a server that is using PHP 4.
Thanks. I will check with my host.
Hi Matthew,
Once again, big thanks for your help and time a while back – and a pretty fast update.
Now the problem is; it seems wordpress has removed this plugin from the directory. What’s going on?
Hi:
In the new version of the plugin I added some tracking code so I can get actual statistics on which version of the plugin is in use and number of sites utilizing the plugin. According to Mark? in the forums this isn’t allowed and he disabled the plugin until it is removed.
Unfortunately he isn’t responding in the forum and my inquiry to WordPress.org has not generated any feedback as of yet which is why the plugin is not listed. I’m hoping to get some response by end of week so I can get it back on the site as I feel this is important information for me so I can know when it is safe to remove upgrade logic and etc, however if I don’t get any response from WordPress then i’ll remove the code this weekend to see if it gets turned back on… which at this point I doubt as they won’t even respond to my querries as to what the actual issue is.
After I did your latest update yesterday, I could not access my site. Got an error message that said Fatal error: Call to undefinied function, etc……on line 1039. The version of WP Amazon Assoc is 1.7.0 according to my dashboard is the version installed, but I don’t know if that was the update, or the earlier version because I had to deactivate the plug in and now the site is working fine.
Please help because I use the plug in heavily, and now the code is hanging out on all my posts where I used it. For example, see:
http://atravelerslibrary.com/2011/07/14/joyeux-bastille-day/
I dread the thought of having to go back and hand code every one of the book titles I have entered using your plug in. GAH!
Thanks for any help you can give.
Vera updating to version 1.7.1 will resolve the issue. There was an unexpected issue with some WordPress installations where the pluggable.php (WordPress ) file is not loading correctly. If issues persist after upgrading to 1.7.1 let me know and I will review further.
That seemed to do the trick. Fingers crossed. Thanks!
I want to ask about making the amazon links no-follow, can this be done or are they already?
Tony:
If links are generated by Short Code then they have ref=”no-follow” added automically. I have it as a to-do item to make static links update to ref=”no-follow”if not set .
I just updated to the latest and it broke my site.
left a fatal error: call to user() … I can’t remember the rest
I had to delete the folder out of my plugin directory. I would like for this to be back in my site, please help!
Hi David, My apologies there seems to be some inconsistency with the WordPress Plugable.php file loading for different users. I have put in a manual check to see if the WordPress wp_get_current_user function is defined and pushed a new version 1.7.1 which should resolve this issue.
Again my apologies!
Just ran your latest update and got this result:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_get_current_user() in /home/tec33428/public_html/wp-includes/capabilities.php on line 1039
Scott:
There seems to be an issue with WordPress loading the Pluggable.php file. I have released version 1.7.1 which should resolve by performing a manual check to see if the ‘wp_get_current_user’ function exists if not the new Admin Localization (logged in administrator able to view site content as locale) option will not function.
My Apologies for any trouble this caused.
Not a problem Matthew, these things happen. I did find a fix at this link:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wordpress-amazon-associateauto-update-failure
After rewriting all the files in the wp_includes folder, editing code in capablities.php, deleting the offending plug in, then holding my breath and re-installing the plug-in, everything is OK.
I just noticed there’s another update. It’s definitely cool to auto-upgrade?
Oh, and no offence meant with “offending plug-in”. My reading last night told me this was a WordPress (and WordPress-related) accident waiting to happen.
Scott:
Yes as using the WordPress “current_user_can” function was causing the error by calling “wp_get_current_user” behind the scenes. I added a does function exist call to ensure that “wp_get_current_user” exists and if not the Admin Localization(logged in admins can view site content as specific locale) feature is disabled.
This is temporary fix until I can determine why the WordPress core functions are behaving differently for different websites.
New install – when I click search from either the toolbar icon or the widget (both in the post editor) no search results are being returned. Did I set something up incorrectly?
Ed:
Did you insert your Amazon Web Services credentials into the plugin settings? They are needed for the plugin to query Amazon via the Amazon Product Advertising API. If you don’t have an AWS account they are free to sign up for and you can find the keys under Account > Security Credentials > Access Credentials
Silly me. All is working, thank you!
My Favorites sidebar widget on has stopped working. We here in California just had our associates memberships cancelled due to a new state law. Is this why it doesn’t work? I would have thought Amazon would simply ignore the associates ID rather than stop displaying products altogether. Thanks for any help on this…
Robert, I’ve tested the plugin with random associate id strings and the widgets displayed just fine. I took alook at your website http://bestrppc.com and I don’t see any My Favorites widget in the sidebar can you send me the correctlink so I can look into it further?
I included the link in my first post, but the post software removed it for some reason. I’ll try again. In case it happens again, the Favorites widget appears on only one page, the Recommended Reading page. It is the bottom item in the sidebar on the right. The page is http://bestrppc.com/recommended-reading/. Thanks for your help.
Robert:
I checked the page on Safari, IE8, Firefox and Chrome. In all browsers I see the My Favorites Wdiget displayed. Do you have any ad/popup blocking plugins configured on your browser of choice? Some of the software will block Amazon Widgets.
I’ve been viewing in Firefox (Mac OS); apologies for not trying a different browser. I just tried it in Safari, and it displays OK (except for a missing right-hand side to the frame for some reason — no big deal). I looked in Firefox for some setting that might prevent display, but can’t find anything. No problem. Good to know it works for others. Thanks for your assistance.
What version of Firefox are you using, just so I can look and see if there is some issue with it.
Version 5.0. Says this is the current version.
Do I need to fix a width setting somewhere to get the box to draw the right side properly? In Chrome and Safari, the hairline on the right side of the box is missing. (I don’t remember this being a problem in the days when I could see the box in Firefox.)
Robert, just tried to take another look about the styling, however I am currently getting a 403 Access Forbidden when I access the page.
Try it now. My WP Firewall plugin has been alerting me about a lot of suspicious activity today. (I’ve been getting a lot of this the past few days; I’m not sure what is going on.) So I may have just blacklisted your IP address by mistake, or the plugin may now be blocking you. (This is all new to me, so just a thought: If it is there, remove “?doing_wp_cron” from the end of the URL you have entered. It may be OK for WP to add this, but perhaps not you. I need to explore this further…)
Still getting 403 error. see if the following is blacklisted 71.176.101.77
As far as I can tell (and I am wondering about my WP firewall plugin being at fault here), I have just ensured that your IP is not blacklisted and is now added to my whitelist. This should do it (or I’ll just deactivate the plugin). Sorry for the inconvenience.
I’ve removed the firewall altogether. Let me know if you still have trouble opening the page.
Robert, I still can’t access the site from my home. However I pulled the site up from work and it does appear to be a width issue. By modifying the width of the plugin to 248 it shows the right border in IE and chrome.
Hmmm. This may be a stupid question, but I’m not seeing a place where you can modify the width of the plug-in in your settings. Maybe I do this elsewhere, in the overall theme settings somewhere? Or is this specific to your plugin and done via css somehow?
And I’m not happy you can’t access the site from your home. I’ve deactivated and deleted the firewall plugin (I think yours was not the only problem with it) and rechecked the deny access list in my htaccess file to include only Albania and the like. All appears OK. Don’t understand why you’re still having problems.
Robert, widths are Widget instance specific. In you Appearance > Widgets menu you can specify the width you want for the My Favorites Widget instance. It is the 2nd option under Basic Properties.
Gotcha. Didn’t think to look there. Cleared up the border thing nicely. Thanks.
And back to my original point (whew): Any further thoughts on getting the widget to display properly in Firefox (Mac OS)?
Robert, I’m still unable to access the website from my location. Unfortunately at work I only have PCs, so I can’t look into why widgets aren’t working on Mac OS Firefox.
OK. Many thanks for your help. I’ll get back to you when — and if — I figure out why you’re being blocked. Needless to say, I’m a bit distressed about that.
Hi Matthew
Looks like a great plugin but we cant tell yet 😉
We have a network WP installs and the individual site admins cannot access the plugin settings menu only the super admin can.
Is this something that can be dealt with in the Plugin end rather than trying to bodge a change to the user roles in WP? What unusual privilege is it that the plugin needs as others work without a problem
Thanks
D
Hi,
Let me review the plugin on my test network WP install. I’ll get back to you shortly with my findings.
You are correct, it appears that the “edit_users” capability is not getting recognized for administrators in the multisite configurations. Switching to “import” makes the Admin pages available. I’m going to review further to see what capability makes the most sense then will push out a bug fix release.
Update:: Version 1.6.1 is released that changes capability to “manage_options” and enables the plugin admin pages for MultiSite Administrators.
I love this plugin for my posts, however I would like to be able to use on my sidebars.
How do I get this to work in my sidebars?
Thanks
Stacey:
Within your WordPress Admin you can add Amazon Widgets to your sidebar by the Appearance > Widgets page. If the widgets are not displaying on your sidebar after you add them send me the page link and I’ll take a look to see what the problem is.
Hi,
Thanks for your quick reply. This is what I’ve done:
In the settings I checked “Amazon My Favorites”
In the Widgets page I dragged the Amazon My Favorites Widget to the sidebar I want it to appear on.
However, adding info the Amazon My Favorites Widget is not what I expected. I was thinking I would be able paste in the code from Amazon’s My Favorite Widget Tool. Since I didn’t find a field to post this code, I completed the Properties and Options fields similar to what I’ve done on Amazon.com.
Nothing showed up in the preview. All that showed up on my page is the title. If I send you the link to my page can you delete it from these comments? I would rather not publish my website at this time.
Thanks,
Stacey
Stacey, send the website url to my email address matt@mdbitz.com and I’ll take a look to see what is occurring. It sounds like if the Widget Preview isn’t working that there may be an underlying issue occurring.
HI, just setting up my first ever site, your widgets look great but they always float off to the right of the sidebar in Firefox (ok in Chrome or IE).
If I add to the footer bar the widget box floats one column right from the title..
Help please….
Tony:
The issue is with your themes css. I took a look at your website and your headers all use “float:left”. This is causing the Amazon Search Widget to display to the right of the title. To resolve you need to update the below css styling on line 39 of style.css in your theme.
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {clear:both;
float:left;
width:100%;
}
to:
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {clear:both;
width:100%;
}
You will of course want to review your website to make sure this doesn’t cause any other styling issues but from the pages I tested this on with Firebug everything was ok.
Thanks for the quick reply, I have never edited a “theme” before so was a nervous 30 seconds or so….. but all worked … all now looks as it should..
Thank you for great advice..
First, thanks for your work on this plugin. Good Amazon plugins are few and far between … I know, I just tried 5 different ones without satisfaction for various reasons.
And that brings me to what’s driving me crazy with your plugin. How for the love of Mike do you float right or left a widget? Oh, I have read the only documentation you have on it in the update log, but that doesn’t say anything.
In the short code I added “container_class=”amazon-left”” then added the rule in my css. Nothing. The class isn’t added.
Please write some documentation about positioning widgets with your plugin …
Oh, let me suggest adding the plugin subscribe to comments so people can monitor your replies to our notes.
Thanks again.
Bill,
The Widgets are directly from Amazon and I haven’t spent time making additional modifications to them at the moment. The container* attributes are only available currently on the amazon_link, amazon_image, and amazon_enhanced items. The best way to align widgets at the moment would be to switch to the HTML editor and wrap the ShortCode in appropriate HTML elements and CSS Styling.
I’ll add a task to see about adding the container* attributes to Widgets as well for the next release.
Is it possible to add an alignment attribute to the amazon_image tag so that we can align it to the left/right and allow text to wrap around it/to the side of it? Something like float:left or float:right?
thanks
Jim:
In short you can align the images by using the container and container_class ShortCode properties. For full details please check out this post in the WordPress Forums or have a look through earlier comments.
Hi Matt,
A couple questions:
1) Is it possible to have links open up a new tab/window when clicked on?
2) Is there any integration with the Amazon API that will let you query the current price for an item?
Thanks!
– Stuart
Stuart, if you use ShortCode to create the links you can add the target property to have links open in new windows.
[amazon_link ... target="_blank" ]...[/amazon_link]The plugin currently uses the Amazon Product API to search for the products, images, and links. Currently per my development plan version 3.0 will have template supports to build your own ad blocks and content using additional information from Amazon.
Hi Matt,
I noticed lately that the quick link pop-ups contain my Amazon ID on posts rather than the post author’s ID. I don’t know if this is new or if it has been like this all along as I had never payed that close of attention. I really need it to show the post author’s ID.
Also, on the “use our Associate id for % of links” I would like to see slots for 15% and 20%. Going from 10% to 25% is a pretty large increment. Some quick instructions to change this would be great, please email me.
Sent a small donation. As the site grows you’ll see more 🙂
JD, took a quick look at the code and it looks like I never updated the product preview logic when I added Multi-Author Support. I’m running some tests now and if everything looks good I’ll send you details on which code lines to modify to correct as well as how to modify the percentages.
JD, You can find the fix for the issue on the new Support Forum I am putting together to help plugin users.
I’ll be sending you a follow up email on the 2nd item in your post. Let me know if you find any other bugs or have any feature requests.
Thanks Matthew,
The fix on the Support Forum worked great.
Thanks Matthew,
I actually do have a feature request. When I get your email I’ll send you a reply with the request.
This looks to be a great plugin and I’ve set it all up without any issue – but now that I’m actually trying to use it to post I’ve discovered it causes the Edit Post page to seize-up and kills much of the functionality – for example I can’t open/close or move the various widgets on the Edit page.
I tried deactivating all other plugins that might be interfering but nothing seems to help, as soon as I reactivate WPAA it all seizes up again – I can write and edit the actual post but nothing else on that page works right. Any ideas?
Eris what version of WordPress and the plugin are you using? I haven’t experienced this issue in any versions I’ve tested : 2.0 + (havent done 2.2 testing yet).
> Matthew
Using WP 3.1.3 and WPAA 1.6.0 – but I think I’ve figured out the incompatibility, it’s WordTwit – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordtwit/
I deactivated all other plugins then reactivated one-by-one until the UI froze up again and it’s all good until WordTwit is active then the page widgets all freeze up again. I can run either plugin on its own but not together. Right now WPAA is more useful to me so WordTwit will just have to remain inactive…
Thanks for your prompt response, appreciate it!
Thanks for the additional information. I’ll have a look at the WordTwit plugin and see if I can determine why there is compatibility issues. I’ll let you know if I resolve the issue.
Eris, I found the underlying issue I’ll include the fix in the next release. In the mean time you can correct the issue in your installed version by the following:
Update wpaa-fancybox-js on line 843 of the WPAA.php file in the plugin to fancybox. This will make it so there is only 1 version of the script included instead of 2 resolving the compatibility issue.
Success! That was a speedy fix!
Really such a useful plugin, I’d been hand-coding Amazon widgets into posts to get the effect I wanted but this is SO much better. Can’t wait to make full use of it – thnx so much!
General issue:
After trialing a few cache plugins and minifying – and then ultimately uninstalling the Amazon search function of the WPAA plugin no longer works. The shortcodes still work fine but when I attempt to search from within a post – the little box leads to my own site and a 404 error. I also have an insights plugin and a flickr search plugin that have stopped working also.
Im guessing that I somehow screwed up my javascript or caused a conflict.
My question is, I have a dev site that has the same basic structure as my main site and the wpaa plugin still works fine there, unfortunately its a bit outdated so I cant simply switch over the files from one install to another. Ive tried uninstalling and reinstalling the WPAA plugin and even have uninstalled all other plugins, yet I still just get a window to my own site and a 404 error when trying to use the amazon widget to search and place.
Obviously, nothing is wrong with your plugin, But, what should I be looking for within my site to restore the javascript you use to load before other scripts? Im hoping that since all plugins worked fine prior to installing cache (since removed) that my only issue is some sort of wrong ordering – When should WpAA load?
Josh:
Unfortunately I don’t have any experience with the content caching plugins that are available for WordPress. WPAA is built to use the WordPress hooks and filters and should not have a dependency on ordering with other plugins. If you haven’t modified any core WordPress files on your site have you attempted a re-install of your WordPress version (available in Dashboard > updates ) of course I’d recommend doing a backup of your files and db first.
~ Matthew
Thats good to know – i was hoping the TinyMCE edits you made use javascript to pull up amazon search?
All other functionality is still fine – but clicking the icon only pulls up a window into my own site rather than amazon?
My wordpress install is heavily modified – Ive been learning to rewrite the function and template changes as individual plugins but Im not very far along yet in those changes and backups so a theme re-install and return to pre-issue format would likely take a week.
I’m not sure if it will be of much use but the tinyMCE control functions by that when clicked a popup opens to the tincymce/amazon/amazon-(widget).php page that is hosted within your installation. The popup editor is not served from Amazon it is part of the plugin and it generates the necessary code to output the widget in the preview section of the editor.
Can you send me the url of the 404 error page? I want to confirm it is being generated correctly also have you checked your .htaccess file to confirm that any redirects entered by the cache modules have been removed?
็Hi
in fill –> Associate Tag >> wp-amazon-XXXX-20 or put xxxx-20 pls help me
Rachata
Rachata: Please put your associate tag xxxx-20 so that you get credit for purchases.
> Matthew
Hi Matthew,
This is an awesome plugin !
I installed it on several of my sites and it works great , the only thing is that there’s an error message in the admin dashboard stating : “WordPress Amazon Associate: Plugin is not configured! Please correct in the settings page”
So I looked in the plugin code and i saw that this error should only appear if the access key or the secret key are missing (of the amazon web services account )
I don’t get it … Can you please explain why this plugin is dependent on an AWS Account ?
As far as I understand it AWS is an online storage service so what does the plugin needs to store/retrieve online?
And again – thanks for this great plugin ,
Ron
Ron:
The plugin makes use of the Amazon Product Advertising API to do product searches and lookups. If you only use the widgets and geo-localization of static links then you don’t need an AWS account. However if you want to use the QuickLinks or ShortCode to search for and insert Amazon Products into your content directly from the post/page editor in WordPress than the Access & Secret Key are required so that the plugin can use the Amazon Product Advertising API.
I’m working on the next version of the plugin currently that will have it so if you don’t have your AWS credentials entered it will disable the features dependent on it. In the mean time you can always put a random string into the Access & Secret Key fields to get rid of the message.
> Matthew
Thanks for the (very) quick answer Matthew ,
BTW – Great site you have here, lots of useful info …
I learn a lot about some interesting API’s here.
Best Regards ,
Ron
Hi Matthew,
Thank you for the great plugin. I wanted to check and see if you had any suggestions regarding how to use the Associate Filter along with another plugin that is providing the content to modify. Specifically, I am using wp-tables-reloaded and one of the tables includes an amazon link. However, when I enable the Associate Filter it does not re-write the link.
I tried using Plugin Organizer to change the order that the plugins load, thinking that maybe wp-tables-reloaded needs to process its output first. But that didn’t seem to solve the problem.
Any suggestions would be appreciated! Or maybe it’s just not finding a link that needs to be changed?
Thanks!
Stuart:
I’m not familiar with the wp-tables-reloaded plugin. How the Associate Filter functions is that it uses the filters the_content and comment_text. If the wp-tables-reloaded plugin utilizes filters as well you may need to set the priority on the WPAA plugin to a higher value so it executes later. I would suggest modifying lines 268 and 269 in the WPAA.php file from:
add_filter('the_content', array(&$this,'filter_amazon_associate_tag'));add_filter('comment_text', array(&$this,'filter_amazon_associate_tag'));
to
add_filter('the_content', array(&$this,'filter_amazon_associate_tag'), 25);add_filter('comment_text', array(&$this,'filter_amazon_associate_tag'),25);
Please let me know if this corrects the issue. If so I’ll see about doing a bug release that has these higher values so that these conflicts don’t occur.
> Matthew
That fixed it. Thanks!!!
Great, I’ll include the changes in the next release so that you don’t need to worry about future upgrades to the plugin breaking the functionality.
Hi Matthew,
The plugin was working beautifully until the recent update.
Now it seems that any link is now removed from the body, and the accompanying text, and placed above the picture at the top of the page.
For example:
http://techstyles.com.au/bone-horn-stand-for-iphone-4/mobile-phone/iphone-accessories/
Actually now that I look at it the validate credentials button doesn’t even work. You press it and nothing happens.
Please advise.
thanks,
Scott
Scott:
Please ensure that your installation of PHP on your host has cURL enabled. This is required to send requests to the Amazon Product Advertising API.
Thanks,
Matthew
yes I installed the plugin – when i click to insert a link the search window opens and its my website not the amazon page. Not sure what is wrong. Please help.
Thanks >Scott
Very curios about one thing.
I want to add the “alt” attribute to images for more SEO potential, but if I add it, it does not appear. What can I do?
Mecr:
Thanks for pointing out this oversite on my part. I’ll make the required changes and do a release of 1.5.2 to include both the alt and title tags for images outputted via the Plugin.
> Matthew J. Denton
Hi
I have just installed the plugin. he amazon codes seem to validate OK but I don’t see any A button on the tinyMCE tool bar. I am puzzled. Can you help please.
Gavin
Gavin:
The A Amazon editor button should be available to all author level and above users when using version 1.5.1 of the plugin. Can you send me a screen shot of what you currently see it would help troubleshoot the issue, I know I’ve seen before that when the browser width is to small that buttons can be hidden behind the right column elements.
Thanks,
Matthew J. Denton
Just a question i keep getting a message that pluging has not been set up properly
I think its got something with the access key and secret key what are these for?
Dom
Dom:
You are correct that message will display until there is a value in the secret and access key fields. If you only plan to use the Amazon widgets through the plugin then you will not need valid access/secret keys. However if you plan to input product links and images through the plugin then these fields are required to access Amazon’s Product Advertising API. You can sign-up for a free Amazon Web Services account to get your unique access/secret keys.
> Matthew
You know, I can’t for the life of me find my Access Key or Secret Key on AWS. Searching was useless.
Any clues where to look?
(I probably will never use AWS though…)
The Access and Secret Keys are found under Account > Security Credentials > Access Credentials
~ Matthew
Hi!
Very well designed plugin. I have a multi user blog that allows the use of some adshare features. I recently noticed that the users with “author” status are not seeing the “a” in the the post editor which has the more advanced options and only have access to the sidebar options which are a little limited. My account (admin) and editor roles get the “a” option, but I cant make the authors all editors as that would allow them to edit each others posts.
Did I miss something? or is this intentional?
Jim:
Are you using version 1.5.1 of the plugin? Another user mentioned the above issue and so I updated the plugin to allow “author” level users the ability to utilize the “a” amazon editor button. If you are using 1.5.1 let me know so I can confirm the code change got submitted correctly into the plugin svn.
Your update has fixed the issue. Thank you for your quick support, Im upping your share for the month! Best of luck!
The “A” functionality is available at all roles but now the author id rotation seems to be overwritten to all users with my own id!
So I removed my ids from the master settings ( I am also an author on the site) and now only your Id is displaying, no matter what I have tried within settings, I have not been able to get the actual author of the posts id to display
That doesnt make me look very trustworthy! ack!
Hey Mathew,
I just noticed that the “widget disable” is for the sidebar type widgets, so disregard the last post. Although it would be nice to have an option to set maximum width 🙂
J.D.
You are right the disable is strictly on the Widget admin screen, I should make it consistent and disable in the editor control as well. The Omakase widget behaves differently then the other widgets in that it has specific sizes.
Currently I don’t have any plans for an interface to define what settings are enabled/disabled for authors/editors on individual website, but I will add this in with the other possible future enhancements.
> Matthew
Seemless integration really looking forward to its potential
Hi,
I’ve been using this plugin for a while on several sites and I love it. However, I just installed it on a new site and got this error when trying to activate the plugin:
Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in /homepages/36/d102158766/htdocs/forex/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate/WPAA.php on line 48
I did the installation in the same manner as usual (via the “Add New” section in plugins, then searching) but it fell over this time.
Any suggestions what I can check?
Many thanks,
-John.
Never mind – I just spotted that my host is still running PHP4 by default, unless I modify my .htaccess!
I updated, and the problem is now fixed!
Thanks for the awesome plugin! 🙂
Kind regards,
-John.
John, I’m glad you like the plugin and that you were able to resolve the issue without much trouble. Let me know if anything else comes up that you need help with.
> Matthew
I recently installed the WordPress Amazon Associate plugin on my site. The plugin was easy to set up and worked flawlessly. If you are needing an Amazon plugin for your WordPress site this is definitely the best plugin out there.
Mathew, thanks for all your hard work and the excellent plugin.
Hi,
Thanks for writing this plugin but it does not seem to work for me.
Let me give you a quick heads-up.
I am based in the UK, my API key/code are from Amazon.co.uk.
I have NOT updated to WordPress 3.1.1
I have selected the following settings:
Installed ip2nation database = yes
Entered my ID’s for Amazon .com,.co.uk,and .ca (others unchecked)
Used Amazon.com as primary locale?
Author Specific Associate tags = yes
Enable Geo location = yes
Have not yet set support % (would like to set unchecked locales to your ID by way of support)
Amazon Web service settings Access/secrets keys = entered API for Amazon.co.uk
Product reviews = not enabled
Amazon Widget = carousel/search only
Amazon Associate Filter Settings = Enabled
All the Amazon links that I have on my site were installed by me, by hand from Amazon.com, using the product
page /get link tab/ product text link only tab/ href link only.
I am not a techie so I don’t know if my settings are correct but when clicking my own links I am directed to
Amazon.com, not to .co.uk so I assume this plug in is not working for me, is there any way to check if it is?
I know for a fact that the Amazon Localizer plugin I have just deleted was not working, I got 626 clicks to Amazon
uk and not one sale or order was recorded, I sent a support ticket to Amazon and here is part of their reply:
Quote: “Having reviewed your website, it appears that the vast majority of the items you review link to their
counterparts on Amazon.com, but not Amazon.co.uk – please bear in mind that Associate links are not enabled for
geo-tagging, and will not automatically redirect a potential customer to the correct regional Amazon site. The best
solution is to have multiple links for each item, one for your American visitors and the other for your British and
European visitors.
Please bear in mind that the Associates Programmes for the Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr,
Amazon.co.jp, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.com sites are completely separate. Each site requires a separate
application, and you will have a different ID for each.
In addition, links formatted for one programme will not be able to earn you commission at the other site.”
I was aware of this of course, hence the plugin, I think this has cost me a fair bit of money so I need a solution, I
don’t really like the idea of setting up three separate country links for one product.
Any advice you could offer about getting this installation to work would be appreciated
Tim:
Took me a couple read through of your posts to identify the underlying “issue” you are having. You state All the Amazon links that I have on my site were installed by me, by hand from Amazon.com, using the product page /get link tab/ product text link only tab/ href link only.
Correct me if I am wrong but your website currently has static Amazon.com links you inserted manually into your page content? If so then the plugin would not modify them. Currenlty the plugin will update the associate tag in static links so that you don’t have to modify existing links if for some reason the tag information was to change. However it does not geo-localize static links only links created with the ShortCode.
The reason for this is that for static links if they were switched to a different locale there is no way to know if the product exists in the new locale and so for now they are not modified. Others have been asking for this feature as well so I am reviewing to see what the best way to implement would be.
> Matthew
Hi Matthew,
Thanks so much for the early reply, I sort of understand it 🙂 It looks like once again I have received erroneous information about placing Amazon links by someone who should know better.
I hope you manage to sort out the geo-tagging thing, it will certainly be very useful to everyone I’m sure.
I would imagine Amazon are making a fortune from lost commissions, I have since checked my other sites and found a new blogger blog, that is dot com only not registering my tracking ID at all.
Anyway thanks for the info about your plug-in, I will certainly be putting it to use, looks like for now I have got to insert several hundred UK links by hand.
Best regards
Tim.
PS sorry about the crap formatting of my other post, I sent before I looked!
Hi Mathew.
Fantastic plugin! Extremely easy for me to set up and use. How can I set this up so that my authors can insert carousels and the other widgets into their posts? Only the Admin and Editor can see the Amazon button in the text editor at this point. Although the authors can use the quick links, I would like for them to be able to use the text editor button rather than me modifying the templates.
Thanks again for this great plugin,
~JD
James:
Thanks for following up with me through email, haven’t checked my website as often as I should. For anyone else that once this you can change the init method in the WPAA.php file to the following to enable for Authors.
public function init() {//init tinymce Amazon Plugin
if (current_user_can('edit_posts') &&
( get_user_option('rich_editing') == 'true' )) {
add_filter("mce_external_plugins", array(&$this,"register_amazon_tinymce_plugin"));
add_filter('mce_buttons', array(&$this,'register_amazon_button'));
}
// add amazon filter if enabled
if( $this->options['FilterAssociateTag'] === true ) {
add_filter('the_content', array(&$this,'filter_amazon_associate_tag'));
add_filter('comment_text', array(&$this,'filter_amazon_associate_tag'));
}
// insert product preview code if enabled
if( $this->options['ProductPreview'] === true ) {
add_action('wp_footer', array(&$this, 'append_product_preview'));
}
// WordPress Bug #15600
remove_filter('the_content', 'shortcode_unautop');
}
When putting an item in my post how do I wrap the text around it and have a padding so that the writing does not touch the ad image and where do I put the code? Been searching for so long and am a complete newbie.
Karen
Karen, in the latest version I added support for the following attributes to the product ShortCodes: container, container_class. You can use these to add a div, span or other element around the images set to your specified css class. Allowing you to float the image as desired.
[amazon_image id="045146379X" target="_blank" container="div" container_class="float-left" /]Let me know if you have any other questions.
> Matthew
It floats left but now the text is at the bottom corner of the amazon image, how do I get it to the top of the image with out it touching the image, such as a small margin between the image and text?
Thanks,
Karen
I’ve been playing with your code and for left float it works great but still having the same problem with the text. I would assume that you would be able to make it float right just by changing the word “left” to “right” but tried it and it doesn’t work at all, it stays left. Shouldn’t I be able to type in the code and it respond properly or should I copy and paste. Still not understanding a lot about wordpress but am trying hard to learn and understand.
Thanks,
Karen
Karen:
You need to define the css class that will be doing the styling. For example within your css file (in your theme) you could define it as:
.float-left {float: left;
padding: 5px;
}
This would have the text wrap around your image as desired. currently it is on the bottom because the image is not floating but has a block display.
> Matthew
Sorry to be so ignorant but where do I find this: “For example within your css file (in your theme)” is it in wordpress or my host (GoDaddy)”?
Karen
Karen css is Cascading Style Sheets that define the look and feel of your website. On your WordPress Admin screen you can go to Appearance > Editor. In the right column you should find Stylesheet under the header Styles. Selecting it will allow you to edit your css.
There is a good chance the theme you are using already has right/left float classes defined that you can use. If not you can add the sample code i sent you to float the product images.
or within the post editor?
Hi. What is the format for entering the associate tag.
Do you need to put wp> then your associate tag.
Thanks.
Glenn: you put them as they are do not modify or you will not get credited.
geez. forgive me for addressing these comments to Tom. I meant Matt, just caught the name Tom off of the last comment on the page
Tom;
Let me update my earlier comment. There is indeed an error message, but it is showing up at the beginning of my posts. It reads as follows:
Warning: preg_match_all() [function.preg-match-all]: Compilation failed: unrecognized character after (?< at offset 18 in /home/cbsop/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate/WPAA.php on line 300
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/cbsop/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate/WPAA.php on line 301
Jerry, I’ve seen this issue with other users and if I remember correctly it has to do with an incompatible version of a php module. Let me see if i can dig up the previous communication on this and get back to you.
I’ve been trying to get your plugin rolling, but am having the following issue. when I try to validate my credentials or to search amazon, nothing happens. a trip to the error console shows that I’m getting the following response from Amazon:
aws-portal.amazon.com : server does not support RFC 5746, see CVE-2009-3555
Any clue what I need to do to correct this?
Jerry, I’ve never seen this error before it appears to be a server configuration issue.
Hey Matt, great plugin! just asking how do you get the text of my articles to wrap around the picture? this is at the beginning of the post
Thanks
Karl, in the latest version I added support for the following attributes to the product ShortCodes: container, container_class. You can use these to add a div, span or other element around the images set to your specified css class. Allowing you to float the image as desired.
[amazon_image id=”045146379X” target=”_blank” container=”div” container_class=”float-left” /]
Let me know if you have any other questions.
> Matthew
Hello,
I’m a bit confused. I’ve tried adding the links to certain items in my posts and also on the sidebar widget. But I haven’t been using shortcodes. Does the localisation only work if I change all my links to shortcodes or would the HTML links I make through amazon work as well?
Christina:
The plugin currently will only localize links that are inserted using the ShortCode. Product links that are entered directly will not be localized, this is a feature in my queue of tasks for a future release.
> Matthew
Hi Matthew
I have got the same problem that Christina has got: html links are not redirected. I understood that this feature is on your todo list, I was just wondering when it is going to be added 🙂
I’m not lazy, I’ve just got too many pages to change every link:)
Many thanks and Regards.
Simon, unfortunately work has been a little crazy lately. I’m hoping to have this change updated within the next few weeks. I’ll make sure to update everyone when I have it in place.
I’m new to amazon links and this plugin so forgive me if this is not an intelligent question… Is there away to apply a CSS class to the enhanced links that show the image, link, and price? I want to float the whole thing left so that I can put text around it but I can’t seem to get it to work.
If I use the alignleft class on the link or the image separately it works but not when I try to add it to the enhanced code…
Nevermind figured out a workaround. Thanks anyways! Oh! and great plugin!
Joshua, I’m glad you got things to work as you needed. I don’t think I added the ability to add container and styles to Amazon’s Enhanced links like I did for the image and product links. I’ll review and update documentation if it exists or add as needed.
> Matthew
Aloha! I’m still getting invalid when I enter my AWS Access Key ID and my Secret Access Key. I’m cutting and pasting right off the Amazon Web Services page… Help!
Don:
For others users this issue happens because their server’s time was out of sync with the actual time. The plugin uses the gmtime function of PHP to get the GMT timestamp used to sign amazon requests. If your server clock is out of sync with actual time then amazon fails saying the request is invalid because it is old. Some users have corrected this by restarting their servers.
> Matthew
Everything was working fine until I upgraded to WP 3.1. Do you think that had something to do with it?
The logic used to make requests to the Amazon Web Service does not interact with any of the WordPress code base and an upgrade to 3.1 shouldn’t affect the validation logic.
Aloha Matthew!
I forwarded what you told me to my server and this is what they said:
“We are sorry for the inconvenience,
There was a issue with time server, now we have fixed the issue.
Kindly check and let us know if you face the issue further.”
But I’m still getting invalid when I enter my Access Key and Secret Key. Should I generate a new set of keys and try again? This is driving me nuts!
FYI, I deleted the plug-in and reinstalled it thinking that would help… It didn’t…
Life Rocks!
Don Windle
Don, Let me put a script together to have you execute on your server. The output should tell me exactly what the underlying issue is. I’m at work but hopefully I can get it to you later this evening (EST).
> Matthew
Thanks for this great plugin. Is there a way I can have a short code that takes the visitor directly to the REVIEWS. I’ll really appreciate if you can give a sample code.
Jimmy: The plugin doesn’t currently support link-through to “sub-pages” such as REVIEWS. The change is to modify the url from dp to product-reviews. I’ll think it over and see if it is something that gets added in a later version. If you want to modify the plugin yourself you can do so for your own needs by modifying the AmazonProduct and WPAA_ShortCodeHandler classes.
> Matthew
To change the dp with product-reviews would be okay for the time being. It might help others as well if you could incorporate this in a future version. I appreciate your clarification
I am using this plugin and liking it’s ease of use quite a bit, however, there is no option (that I know of) to make the links generated “nofollow” so as to follow Google’s guidelines for bloggers posting affiliate links. Is there any way to do this, is this is a feature that you will consider adding?
many thanks,
Kashif
Kashif:
Version 1.5.0 of the plugin supports the ref attribute for links. You don’t need to do anything as the amazon_link ShortCode automatically will add ref=”nofollow” to links.
Thanks,
> Matthew
Awesome … I just upgraded and it works automatically! Great plugin!
I am confused… I am installing this for a friend. I entered the Associate Tag – but it still shows “WordPress Amazon Associate: Plugin is not configured! Please correct in the settings page” What do we need to do?
Hi, The reason you get the above message is because you have not entered your Amazon Web Services Secret and Access Keys into the Settings Page of the plugin. Your credentials are needed to authenticate with the Amazon Product Advertising API to search for and obtain product information. If you are using only the Widgets in the plugin then by putting a random character into the input fields will make the error message go away.
> Matthew
Hi Matthew, excellent plugin. Works like a charm. 🙂 But I have a question regarding the Amazon Search widget. I installed it at the very bottom on the site of a friend (http://www.reviewsbyjessewave.com). The page numbers of the search results are displayed vertical and not horizontal. How can I change that?
Thanks,
Christian
Christian:
I’ve seen this happen for other users. In all cases it has been a css conflict. Amazon utilizes the id “nav” in it’s rendered css and if your site also uses the #nav id in the css it can cause the navigation to display vertically. The easiest fix I have seen is to change your sites css of the #nav id to #nav-site or similar and you should be all set.
Thanks,
> Matthew
Hi
I’m trying to get the plugin to work. I have configured the plugin and entered valid access and secret keys. I have also entered my associate tag in all locales, but these seems to revert to ‘wp-amazon-associate-20’ or similar. Is that what is expected?
When I trying to use the pluin from the TinyMCE editor, everything seems to work fine and there is a code added to my post (for example [amazon_link id=”0711226156″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][/amazon_link]) but when I publish and view my post nothing is displayed (or just the code). Is there anything more I should do?
I can’t get the widgets to work either. I add and configure them, but the only thing showing is the title of the widget… The preview of the widget is just white.
I have a testpost on my website for amazon if that gives any more input…
Some help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Cecilia: I took a look at your test page and for me the carousel widget is rendering without issue. However I see that your link is not present. I have noticed that WordPress will not render two ShortCodes right after each other is there a new line between your widget and link?
For the Assoicate Tags I just clicked on a link in the widget and it is showing the tag as theenthgrow-20 which I assume is the Associate Tag you entered in the plugin.
Thanks for your fast reply.
No, I don’t have any linebreak in between so that can explain why the link doesn’t show.
I also found out why it didn’t show up in my browser. Adblock stopped it!
thanks again!
Excellent, please let me know if you have any other issues or questions.
I keep on getting the “WordPress Amazon Associate: Plugin is not configured! Please correct in the settings page” message, even after I’ve added my id’s.
Hi, the reason for that message is because you have not entered your Amazon Web Services credentials into the plugin. These are required for the plugin to be able to search for and insert product links into post/pages. If you don’t need this functionality you can simply put a random character in the Secret & Access Key fields and the message will go away.
Aaah thanks, that did it.
I am sorry but how do i put a link when i turn off the WYSIWYG editor. Can you give an example code ?. I have two locales US and Canada and where do i put the associate id ? . This seems obvious but i have a hard time with the format
Hi:
First the Associate Id will get inserted when ShortCode and Widgets are rendered on page load so if you have entered your associate id into the WP – Amazon > Settings page then you will get credited for any products sold through your links/widgets.
Second if you use the HTML editor I would highly suggest you use the Amazon Quick Links panel in the right sidebar of the editor pages this will allow for you to quickly and easily search for and insert Amazon products into the content. If you want to manually set specific locales you can modify the Short Code to include locale=”US” and locale=”CA”
Example
[amazon_link id="B0007QU6RY" target="_blank" ]Apple PowerBook G4[/amazon_link]If you want to have the product render to the appropriate locale by default then you will need to install and activate the GeoIP feature of the plugin which can be done on the WP – Amazon > Settings page of the plugin. You will also want to deactivate locales that you don’t want to support.
Let me know if you have any additional questions.
> Matthew
I am confused with the link id and where do i find the link id. Everything in the plugin control panel including geo ip has been set up and what i find confusing is the link id and the format that you have to enter. I really appreciate your help. BTW, my site is http://learnsignlanguageonline.org
I guess I have found out the link id’s and could you please confirm as to how to left align the images. I have read the short code for that somewhere on this site but don’t know where it is and with reference to the locale, is the following a correct format
[amazon_image id="1435654320777" link="true" target="_blank" size="medium" locale=”US” locale=”CA”]title of product [/amazon_image]Jimmy:
The id #143565432077 is not a valid Amazon Product Id. If you are looking up products manually on Amazon then you can find the id in the url after dp/. For Example the below link’s Amazon ID is 045146379X.
http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Story-Dresden-Files-No/dp/045146379XThe ShortCode only recognizes a single locale attribute if you want it be based of the user’s Geo IP then simply don’t put the locale tag if you want the link to always be US or CA then put the single entry in the ShortCode.
To add a css class to the image you can add the class attribute to the ShortCode.
An example ShortCode for the items you mention would look similar to the following.
[amazon_image id="045146379X" link="true" target="_blank" size="medium" class="alignLeft"]title of product [/amazon_image]Sorry for being a pain. So if i have the geoip enabled and the respective country id’s set up in the plugin control panel, I just have to insert the image or the link and the plugin would sense the user’s local automatically and I DO NOT have to add the locale=”XX” manually in the code. I am I true ?
Yes, that is correct. You DO NOT have to add the locale=”XX” entry.
This plugin doesn’t work. I have already add shortcode in my post but not showing link. Just show the text without link
What I must to do??
Hi:
I’m going to need some additional email to assist you in the issue you are having.
1) What ShortCode are you using (if possible a sample of the code you have in your page would be great)
2) Have you configured the WP > Amazon Settings page with your Amazon Web Services Credentials (Access & Secret Keys)?
Thanks,
> Matthew J. Denton
This is sample code >> [amazon_link id=”B002SSUKTS” target=”_blank” locale=”US” ]check price now[/amazon_link]
I have configure the plugin including access key and secret key and that key is new. I mean I have regenerate access and secret key from amazon AWS
Could this plugin conflict with the theme that I use? I am using arras theme on my blog
I got the problem. Something wrong with my access and secret key. I try to use another plugin which using amazon secret and access key and all doesn’t work
I don’t know how to fix it. But, I like with your plugin. Thank’s for share buddy
I’ve seen this with other users and for them it turned out their server was refusing the connection. I’m going to send you a test script to your provided email. If possible please execute it on your server and send me the output. It will let me get a better understanding of why your keys aren’t functioning.
> Matthew
When I run another plugin with Amazon API required, I got this massage
Amazon API Error: Code=RequestExpired, Message=Request has expired. Timestamp date is 2011-02-25T11:40:37Z
What’s that mean and how I can solve that
I believe the issue may have to do with the time not being generated for the specific timezone causing the request to be considered expired by amazon. I’ll take a closer look and see if that is the case or not.
Hi, I just reviewed the code and currently the plugin is getting the time based on the GMT timezone that Amazon requires. I’ve done some investigation and it may be the case that your server’s system time is not correct, causing the Timestamp to be considered expired by Amazon.
how can I set up your plugin for Italy ???
Giancarlo:
At the moment the Italy locale is not supported because Amazon has not localized their Product Advertising API for the Italy locale. Once that is available Italy will be supported in full.
Thanks,
> Matthew
oh okay so is that why there are no active checks next to Italy and China?
For the countries I don’t have associate accounts with is it okay to leave the “wp-amazon-associate” number that is set there already even though they are no activated? I was worried that even though I have it set to 0% going to you personally from any sales that just cause that filler account number is there it might affect getting click throughs and possible sales.
Christina:
How the plugin functions is that if you uncheck a locale they are considered inactive and no links will be generated for that locale. If geo-localization is enabled and it is determined that the visitor is from a inactive locale the link will be generated with your primary locale.
You do not need to remove the “wp-amazon-associate” set for inactive locales they will not be utilized. By selecting 0% (default setting) it means that your will get all links generated by your inputted associate tag.
> Matthew J. Denton
I keep modifying the width and design of the “amazon my favourites widget” in my sidebar – so that the colours and design match the theme layout, but it keeps disappearing when I review the blog page…
any ideas?
Emma:
sorry, I am not quite following the issue you are having. Do you mean that after you change the width and design options in the Widgets Admin and save the changes that those options are not present when you view the actual web page? Or is it that the widget itself keeps disappearing when you visit the web page?
~ Matthew
I have searched high and low and don’t know where to find my Acces and Secret Key. Any Ideas?
Never mind, I Googled it.
Please consider a “how to set up” simple steps for us non tech folks. I’ll go back to WP page but the set up is not easy if you are not tech savvy> I am so frustrated I cant get this to work!
It’s in the works, just don’t have the time to spend on it at the moment. In the meantime please have a look at my comments below to other users asking the same question as it has step by step instructions on setup.
Excellent plugin, Matt!
I like the widgetization but I’d like to put Amazon on pages as well. Using the [amazon_carousel] tag syntax from your documentation is really easy. I found one example of a size parameter for your tag.
Where can I find a list of the other parms the tags will accept? (The widgets give drop downs for the various parms – ASIN list, etc.) Or…
How can I feed the carousel tag an ASIN list?
Thx
Tom:
All the parameters that can be used in the ShortCode for the Amazon Carousel can be found on it’s detail page. Also you can use the Amazon Widget TinyMCE control available on the Page/Post Editor within the wordpress admin will allow you to create the widget through a UI for insertion into your page.
Thanks,
> Matthew J. Denton
I tried this and simply could not get the amazon widgets to show up on my site. Nothing. Any ideas?
Lynda, did you try the link I put at the end of my comment below? If so did you not see the search widget? Also what browser and its version are you using?
First off great plugin!
Is there a way to enter multiple amazon tracking codes, i have created track codes for specific items like product images, product text and certain locations where these are placed..i want to track them all separately. How can I enter those tracking codes and select which one I want to use for a specific item.
thanks!
Ty:
At the moment the plugin is built to use the single tracking id entered into the settings page. However I don’t see any issue with allowing users to enter specific tracking ids for links and widgets they create. I’m currently wrapping up the next version of the plugin, once complete I’ll do a minor release with this capability.
Great thanks!!
Matthew:
I am new to this business and my brain is getting old, so I need your help in getting my amazon affiliate links going as well as other providers. Does your program work with other affiliates such as Renegade Marketing? I chose WPAA because you seem to be very active and prompt in supporting your clients. I started to get WPAA configured, now how do I hook it up to Amazon? I want to sell my own book that is on Amazon as well as my faves from them. What is PHP5? Do you have a step by step tutorial. If you can help me use your system, I will be generous. JU
John:
To answer your question:
A) The WordPress Amazon Associate (WPAA) plugin is built to integrate with Amazon Associate program. It does not interact with any other affiliate programs and I do not plan for it to do so.
B) The plugin requires that your web server is running version 5 or greater of PHP. Your web host should be able to provide you with your version if aren’t tech savvy.
C) I’m in the process of writing a step by step setup tutorial for the plugin, however it always seems to get set to the side for some other items I am working on. Below are the basics steps for setting up and using the plugin.
1) Update the plugin with your Amazon Associate Tags
– Access the Settings admin page by clicking the WPAA – Amazon link in your WordPress Admin
– Use the Amazon Associate Settings box to update your global settings
– Select your Primary location
– Input your associate id/tag soo links use your information
2) Input your Amazon Web Services Credentials
– On the Settings admin page scroll down to the Amazon Web Services
Settings box
– Input your AWS Access and Secret Key
* This information is needed to be able to use the Amazon Product Advertising API to search Amazon for products. Amazon Products, Images and the Quick Link Editor on page/post editor screens will not function without this information.
3) Enable Geo Localization (Optional)
– In the Amazon Associate Settings Box check the Enable Geo Localization option
– If you do not have the IP2Nation database installed a link will be presented to take you to the IP2Nation settings page of the plugin where you can install it.
* Geo Localization will render amazon links and widgets based on where the current user is. e.g. If a visitor to your website is from France they will be presented with links that direct to the amazon.fr locale.
4) Enable Multi-Author Support(Optional)
– In the Amazon Associate Settings Box check the “Enable use of Author Specific Associate Tags” option
* Once checked users are able to input their own amazon associate tags from their User settings page of wordpress admin. This allows for web content authors to put in amazon links and widgets that they would get revenue from.
Once all your settings are configured the easiest way to insert product links is to use the Quick Links form that you will find on your post/page editor in the right hand column. It allows you to search amazon by category and keyword for a product and insert it directly into your posts content.
If you want to insert an Amazon Widget you can use the Appearance>Widgets page of the WordPress Plugin if your theme supports widgets or you can use the tinyMCE editor tool that is on the post/page content editor. (the button has the amazon logo on it). This button allows you to insert widgets and links into your content as well.
D) The plugin does not support the Amazon aStore currently which sounds like something that you may be interested in. It’s on my to-do list for a future release.
Hopefully this helps you get started and let me know if you have additional questions.
Matt:
Thank you for your prompt reply. I got tied up with other stuff and was looking for your response in another area of your website. I’m working my way through this.
Thank you again,
John U
Okay, so I’m wondering how you can make these links “no follow”. Normally I would just add rel=”nofollow” but I tried that with this plugin and it didn’t work. I get the feeling that’s because there is no <a> when adding the code. It’s just the [Amazon] ordeal.
Any ideas?
Nate:
Nice catch, the current code does not support setting the rel attribute of an <a> tag. I’ll add it to my task list for the 1.5 version of the plugin that I am hoping to wrap up soon.
> Matthew
Thanks Mathew! I’m really enjoying your plugin.
Matthew;
First of all, great plugin. Relatively easy to use. However with WP 3.0.5 and the latest BuddyPress I am unable to use any Amazon Product Links.
1. My Keys (public/secret) are claimed to be ‘InValid’ though they are clear copy – pastes.
2. In the Post, after using the Amazon Product link it appears as:
—
[amazon_link id=”B003YMV2G2″ target=”_blank” locale=”US” ]Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood[/amazon_link]
—
Am I taking the rights steps to display a product and its picture? Is my issue with the keys resulting in the product link not showing correctly?
Jason:
I took a look at your site and it appears to me that perhaps ShortCode is not functioning with your current setup, as I notice that the Amazon Easel shortcode [az_easel item=”B003YMV2G2″ ] is also not displaying on your website.
I have had issues with the public/secret key validation where valid keys are displaying as invalid. If you are able to use the Quick Links to search for products or the Amazon Product Link tinyMCE control to insert products then you can ignore the ‘Invalid’ message. I’ve tried a few fixes to the validation logic but currently haven’t had success getting all the bugs worked out.
Thanks,
> Matthew J. Denton
Thanks for taking a look so quickly. I have tested the Quick Links and it has also shown not working.
Is there anyway to debug this on my end, or any configs I can turn on to allow Debugging?
Also on the other Amazon Link: Yes, it also does not work on the site. I didn’t know if this had something to do with the fact I am running BuddyPress or not…
Jason, WPAA and BuddyPress should not have any compatibility issues. I would suggest generating new keys on the Amazon Web Services website and see if they validate correctly within the plugin. I’ll also take a closer look at my validation logic to see if there are any other settings in the Amazon Product Advertising API that could be causing the error.
> Matthew
I have generated a new access key twice, and still it shows InValid. I have copied them over to notepad and pasted them in WP/BP, and I have also typed them in.
Am I doing something wrong with TinyMCE or the input formats of WP? I am actually a lot more familiar with Drupal, so I am at a loss of where I can debug and TS.
Jason, If possible can you share with me through email (matt@mdbitz.com) your Secret Key / Access Key you generated? I’ll run them on my test site to see if they load up and if not will be able to debug. Once I determine the issue I’ll let you know so you can deactivate the keys so that I no longer have access to your account. Also as a reference for myself can you let me know what version (5.?.?) of PHP you are currently running on your web server
Hi Matt,
All sorted now, works like a dream.
Thanks very much for your help.
Marcel
Great! glad to help.
Thanks Matt,
That is all working now.
The only other thing I noticed is that the Amazon Carousel widget in my sidebar does not change the links when I access it from the U.K. I have de-installed the Amazon Carousel I created at the Amazon website. Then I ticked the CArousel box in your plugin, but nothing happens at all. No Carousel widget on the blog.
I then put the original Amazon Carousel widget back on the sidebar and checked the Carousel box in your plugin.
When I check the link from my PC in the U.K. it still goes to the Amazon.com site rather than the Amazon.co.uk site.
Please advise.
Thanks,
Marcel
Marcel, I’m glad I was able to help with the links to insert an Amazon Carousel Widget into your website you need to either do so through Appearance > Widgets page of the WordPress Admin or you can insert widgets directly into post and page content by using the Amazon drop down button of the editor and Selecting the Carousel Widget.
Hello,
I am trying to make this message go away:
WordPress Amazon Associate: Plugin is not configured! Please correct in the settings page
I have already uninstalled/deleted this plugin but for some reason the above message keeps popping up on every one of my pages in my admin panel. Will you please tell me how to get rid of it? I do like the plugin, but just don’t have any need/use for it at this time.
Thank you!
-M
Margo. Please confirm you have deactivated the WordPress Amazon Associate plugin from within WordPress. I have verified on my test sites that by deactivating the plugin the admin notice will not be displayed.
Thanks
> Matthew
Hi Matthew,
Thank you for your prompt reply! I actually have deactivated the WordPress Amazon Associate plugin from within WordPress. In fact, I had a graphics designer teacher check this out for me and he, too, confirmed that there’s no reason the message should still be popping up on all of my admin pages. He, too, couldn’t figure out why it won’t go away.
I want to use this plugin for a new website that I’m in the process of having built, but I don’t want it on this one. What else can I try?
Thank you!
Best,
Margo
Margo: Please confirm that the wp-content/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate directory is removed from your site. With that folder gone there should be no way for the error message to display as the php code that gets tied into the admin_notices hook will be gone.
Thanks Matthew, you’ve been so helpful! I finally was able to remove it. It’s a great plugin; going to be perfect for my next project! All the best to you:)
Hi Matthew,
I have installed your plugin, configured it completely including the Amazon Web Services.
I have setup the Amazon Tag for all the different locales in the format: [amazon id]. So no “wp” or “wp-amazon” in front.
I am based in Thailand and when I click a link it goes to Amazon.com using my USA Amazon ID. If I login to a PC in my company in the U.K. and use the web browser to access my website and click on a link, it still goes to the USA site i.e. Amazon.com.
Any ideas why that is?
Thanks,
Marcel
Marcel:
It sounds to me that you do not have the Geo-Localization option enabled. When on the WP – Amazon Settings page is the option Enable Geo Localization selected or does it instead say that you need to install ip2nation? The Geo Localization option is dependent upon the ip2nation database that maps ip addresses to countries/nations. You can use the WP – Amazon – ip2nation page to install the database in your database. Once you have done so enable the Geo Localization option and the links will change based on location.
Also make sure to check with Amazon locale you want as your primary locale if you don’t want it to default to USA (Amazon.com)
> Matthew
Thanks Matthew,
I have already installed the ip2nation database and checked the “Enable GEO Location” box as well.
I want it to default to the USA and have checked the box next to “Amazon Locale”: USA.
Just a thought, does it make a difference which type of Amazon affiliate links I use? I normally click the “Link to this page” and then copy only the link information between the quote marks after the <a href=.
Marcel: If possible can you send me a link to the actual page containing you link as well as the page content from the editor in WordPress. This will allow me to troubleshoot the issue faster and to see exactly how things are setup. You can send the information to me through email at matt@mdbitz.com
Thanks,
> Matthew J. Denton
Hi,
I am an Italian user
I’d like to help you for the plug-in which does not completely support Italy localization (and is not translated at all)
other thing, I am totally blind, and the radio buttons and checkboxes in the settings menu, are not properly labeled, that is, I thought to have clicked italy and instead I may have clicked japan, don’t know 🙂
(try it navigating the screen without mouse, with the tab key, and using a screen reader such as Macintosh voiceover, which is integrated, or on windows download NVDA – http://www.nvda-project.org)
thanks in advance
Elena:
You are correct in that the plugin does not fully support the Italy localization. This is due to the Amazon Product Advertising API not having an option for the Italy locale.
I do apologize for not having the plugin easily useable by those such as yourself that do use screen readers. I will make sure to add it to my to-do list so that you and others will be able to use the plugin to it’s fullest.
OK I can understand about the API – maybe it’s because Italian amazon web site amazon.it has just been released, it’s 2 or 3 months maximum
So, I suppose, it does not depend on you at all, amazon company must work on the programming interface …if they’re interested in, of course
Aaargh. All my work for nothing. The Amazon widget is flash based! It will not run on iPad. Is there another version of the widgets that is html5?
Mike, All the Widgets you find in the plugin are the official Amazon Widgets and at the moment there are no alternate versions of them. I plan to roll out a templating system in a future release that will enable users to create their own custom widgets.
I installed the latest version 1.4.1, got Amazon web services keys and got it to work.
I entered the “Amazon Associates Tag” as
wp-amazon-(My assoc ID)-20 for US and enabled as primary.
Is this correct format to get credit with Amazon? Do I only replace the primary tag for US with this or change all the national tags to this?
Thanks – Great help for new associate to use Amazon program without struggling with their widgets! Great plugin.
Mike
Mike, the correct value you want to enter for the associate tag is simply your associate ID. If you only have an account with the US Amazon Affiliate program then you only need to enter a value into the US locale, however if you have international associate accounts (UK/JP/etc) you will want to enter them as well so you can use geo localization of links/widgets.
I would like to apply styling to the product image generated by the shortcode.
Could you surround the a and img tags with a div containing a class something like “wpaa-product-link” so that we may apply styling, such as a float?
Thanks!
Jay, posted this on the WordPress forum but I added your request as a ticket for my next release. I’ll update the plugin to allow users to specify optional container and container_class attributes that will wrap images and a tags with the specified values.
Matthew, just in the testing phase of the plugin and am loving the versatility so far. Quick question regarding GoCodes/Pretty Links type redirects and this plugin.
Say I want an affiliate link to appear as mywebsite.com/amazon/trinket on a page, then have that redirect to Amazon. Can you think of an easy way to achieve this with your plugin while maintaining the link localization? The two redirect plugins I mentioned ask for a URL, but the [amazon_link] tag returns an <a href rel=”nofollow”>.
I’m sure I could hack around and find a helper function that outputs just the URL as a string, but thought I’d ask if you knew a better approach or could point me in the right direction.
Hi, I haven’t give much thought into outputting only product urls. To be frank I don’t see why you would need to mask an amazon link as your own link especially when you can track outgoing links with Google Analytics and other web tracking tools. I find such links to be deceiving to visitors.
It wouldn’t be much effort to output just the url but without additional information on why this would be beneficial I don’t plan to include it into the plugin.
Thank you for making this plugin! Is there any way to include a tracking id?
Mike, the tracking id gets embedded by default. You can input your specific amazon id by logging into your WordPress Admin and selecting the WP – Amazon > Settings page. On this page you can enter your tracking id as well as enable/disable other settings in the blog.
Sorry, I am either not being clear or blind for not seeing it. I do have my Amazon Associates ID in there but I was looking for a way to also put in a tracking id so that I can track activity that came from one specific site vs. my other sites.
Mike:
Thanks for the additional information, makes the issue clearer. Amazon allows you to create as many tracking IDs as you want for an account. If you want reporting based on each site I would suggest creating an Associate Tag for every site than configure each site’s plugin’s settings with that unique associate ID. This way you can pull up Amazon’s reports based on individual tags to get your desired report.
Please let me know if that works, or if you are on a Multi-Site install of WordPress as I haven’t done testing of the plugin on such a setup currently.
Thanks,
> Matthew
Hi Matthew
I just tried installing the plugin (version 1.4.1, direct from the Plugins panel on my WordPress site) and got the following error:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in /home/content/m/i/k/mikestuff/html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate/WPAA.php on line 48
Any ideas?
Cheers
Mike:
The error above means that your server is not running PHP5 which is a requirement of the plugin. I don’t have any plans to support PHP4 at this time, so hopefully your hosting provider can upgrade your account.
Thanks,
> Matthew
When I configure the widget, I add the ASIN numbers and click insert widget. The widget looks great except for a little box in the corner that says “get widget”. When clicked, it takes you to the Amazon Associates’ page. What is it and how can I disable this?
Angelo:
These widgets are Amazon’s official widgets. The purpose of this plugin is to simplify the integration of widgets and links into your WordPress powered site. Amazon does not allow you the option to disable “get widget” button as they want other individuals to sign up for their associate program.
> Matthew
After installing and setting up the plugin our webpage get stuck on accessing Amazon’s site and will not display. I put the access code and key in, and setup a search widget in the sidebar. Thank You, Paul
Paul:
I haven’t come across this issue before. I’ll look into it and let you know if I find anything.
I am in WordPress setting up the Amazon plugin however under Web Service Settings you ask for an “Access Key” and “Secret Key.” I am assuming the Access key is my Amazon Tracking ID#. Where in the world do I obtain the Secret Key?
Marnie:
The Access & Secret Key are your Amazon Web Service credentials. If you don’t have an Amazon Web Service account you can create one by following the link in that section to http://aws.amazon.com/. Your credentials can than be found under Account > Security Credentials of the website.
This information is necessary to make calls from the plugin to the Amazon Product Advertising API to get product information and links.
> Matthew J. Denton
Hello,
Great plugin. I have a few questions. How do I know if my Id is actually giving my credit if someone buys my product? Also why do you need to enter and sign up for a web service account? Will your plugin wok without that info. I have an amazon affiliate account so do I need both?
Andrew:
The Amazon Associates web page has reports that itemize what has been purchased through your links/widgets. In the reports you can also get additional information on how many links/widgets were displayed to visitors and etc. You can also view the source of your web page that contains a widget/link and it will show your associate id in the link code itself with the variable tag=XXX or t=X in some widget cases.
You do not need an Amazon Web Services account if you strictly want to utilize the Widgets that are made available with the WordPress Amazon Associate plugin. However if you want to have product links you will need an AWS account as the plugin utilizes Amazon’s Product Advertising API to search for products and that requires users to authenticate themselves with their AWS credentials. You need an AWS account if you want to utilize all the features built into the plugin.
This brings up a good idea for a future enhancement, I’ll see if I can include a functionality check in the plugin so that if a user doesn’t enter the AWS information that functionality dependent on it is disabled.
Hope this answers your questions, and if you have any others don’t hesitate to ask.
> Matthew
Hi Mathew,
Thank you for this nice plugin to make it easier to showcase Amazon products with affiliate links in WP. However, I have a question about the requirement of my S3W security credentials. As far as I understand, those are needed by me to access my account and my buckets and put in the cloud whatever I have in one of my buckets. The s3w does not have a direct link to Amazon.com store, affiliate, or regular site to grab and deploy Amazon products via s3w. Furthermore, Amazon clearly states not to share with anyone your security key and your secret key. Doing so, gives anyone access to your account and to all services offered by AWS, including paid ones. However, your plugin doesn’t seem to work without that information. Therefore, I would like to know why does your plugin require s3w security information to work?
Thank you for your prompt reply.
Barb:
The WordPress Amazon Associate plugin utilizes Amazon’s Product Advertising API to search for products and generate links. This API requires users to authenticate themselves through their Amazon Web Services credentials, which is why the plugin requires you to enter this information.
The information you enter into the plugin is not communicated to anyone including myself it is saved into your WordPress database and used only for authenticating requests made through the Amazon Product Advertising API.
Enjoy the plugin,
> Matthew
Hi,
I just installed the plugin. But I don’t have idea how to use it. How to use it on posts/pages? What will be codes? I need Amazon Product Preview, just the way it is on Amazon website
Thanks in advance!
Shailendra:
1st thing you will need to do is configure the plugin with your Amazon Associate Tag/Id. This is done on the WP – Amazon config screen within your WordPress admin. After you enter your associate information you will also need to input your Amazon Web Services credentials as they are used to look up products. If you don’t have an AWS account the link to sign-up can be found on the config screen.
Once you have your credentials entered you can turn on product preview by enabling it on the config page. After it is enabled you can insert products/widgets through ShortCode [amazon_image] , [amazon_product], by using the tinyMCE Amazon button, or through the Quick Links panel on the side bar of the post/edit page. All widgets can be configured through the Appearance > Plugins panel of the WordPress Admin.
Please have a look at the other pages of this website to get further information on the different features.
I’m having some trouble implementing this plugin that I have spent an hour or so trying to debug.
I have embedded the shortcode below into a post which I then reference on the page where I want the amazon.com search box to appear:
[amazon_search default_search_term=”Spirituality” search_index=”Books” columns=”1″ rows=”5″]
This results in two errors:
1. The search box reports “No results for"Spirituality"” indicating that something somewhere is reformatting the query string incorrectly. That makes this feature useless in my case.
2. if I replace the search string in the search box to just use the word Spirituality, I get five results but only one at a time is shown, with a pager to navigate among them.
What am I doing wrong or misunderstanding?
You can see this result if you like by going to http://www.unitymontereybay.org/our-bookstore and scrolling to the bottom of that page.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
Matthew, you can ignore my post. After I left it, I decided to try removing the strings around the parameters in my shortcode call to amazon_search. Doing so fixed both issues.
But it’s worth noting that I took the syntax directly from your page where you describe how the call should work. Quoted string parameters don’t work in Chrome, at least.
Dan, I’m glad you were able to resolve the issue. However I wanted to let you know that I did some testing in chrome and am able to use quotes around the parameters without the issue you described. If possible can you let me know what other plugins you are using? I would like to verify that there isn’t some underlying bug in my code that may occur.
This looks like a great plugin and I am planning on using it. Is there any way to including settings for Amazon Australia? A lot of my visitors are from Australia.
Nicole, to my knowledge there is no Amazon Australia website or affiliate program. If Amazon decides to create an Australia version then I will incorporate it into the plugin at that time.
Matthew, great plugin! I just installed your plugin and have setup my Amazon web services keys which have been ‘validated’. However, when I use the amazon quick links search in my page/post edit page, I can search for products but nothing happens when I insert link/insert images. I looked at my cpanel error logs and I see this:
[Wed Dec 22 11:11:13 2010] [error] [client 99.247.72.157] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘AmazonProduct_Exception’ with message ‘Access and/or Secret Key is not configured’ in /home/hanif/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate/APaPi/AmazonProductAPI.php:192nStack trace:n#0 /home/hanif/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate/APaPi/AmazonProductAPI.php(981): AmazonProductAPI->execute(Object(AmazonProduct_Request))n#1 /home/hanif/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate/servlet/index.php(43): AmazonProductAPI->browseNodeLookup(‘927726’)n#2 {main}n thrown in /home/hanif/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate/APaPi/AmazonProductAPI.php on line 192, referer: http://ustadhanif.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wordpress-amazon-associate-config
Any help would be appreciated! thanks!
Hi Ustad:
The error message shown is not related to the quick links. It looks like I need to update the plugin logic so that if the fields are empty they don’t try to validate the keys. If you are able to search for products but the buttons are not functional that would be a JavaScript issue. Can you let me know what browser (and it’s version) you are using? I must confess I tested in Firefox but not the other browsers.
Thanks,
~ Matthew
Hi,
I had the same issue and found out, that I have to change from the HTML to the Visuell view in the article.
Then it worked.
Brgds
Thanks, Manuel. I was checking on different browsers and wasn’t able to reproduce, I totally overlooked the HTML view. I will take a look at the code after the holiday weekend and hope to have a fix out soon to correct this.
Manuel, Version 1.4.1 of the plugin corrects the issue with the Quick Links not functioning when users are on the HTML editor. Thanks again!
When you say “In addition the plugin contains basic support for link filtering of Amazon’s Italy (IT) and China (CN) markets”, what exactly do you mean by “basic support”?
Do you mean that If I create a normal text link and get the affiliate code from Amazon US (At the top of product page, where it says “Link to this page”), then this would be changed to my Amazon China affiliate ID when a user from China comes to my site?
Thanks in advance!
Hi, by Basic Support I mean that if a static link ( one created by “link to this page” ) exists on your website and you have enabled Link Filtering in the Settings then any amazon.it and amazon.cn links will be modified to have their tags match the associate id you entered in Settings.
Currently when a static link is present on the page there is no Geo Localization that occours. Only links that are created through the plugin are able to render based off the visitors location (IP Address). Once the Amazon Product Advertising API is updated with support for Italy and China I will make sure they have the same functionality as the other locales.
Hi Matt,
Just a heads up, looks like the ip2nation site has gone awol, may need to find another way to localise the links.
Also the .it and .cn amazon sites are now live – don’t forget to add them to the localeByCountry function call.
Cheers,
Paul
Paul, I actually put a backup of the database on my site the plugin should utilize it if ip2nation goes down. As for .it and .cn the Product Advertising API does not currently support them so they can’t be added to the localeByCountry functionality as of yet.
Please forgive my ignorance as I am very new. I’ve successfully linked to a product and AWS is correctly configured. However, when I access my associate account I tried to test the link through the “link checker” tool. After testing the link I get the message “Fail: The link does not correctly tag for your Account.” What am I missing?
Thank you for your help!
Connor: Did you input your associate tags on the WP – Amazon > Settings admin page? Also if you send me the link you were tryingto validate I can provide more assistance.
Thanks for this plugin, it looks quite good. I have a few points / questions:
* The plugin seems to create links using the & character when it should use the & entity (using & will break XHTML pages and is not valid HTML either)
* Does the plugin do any caching of the info it retrieves from Amazon?
* If I want to add my own custom shortcode that would display the image, title and price, would I do this by editing ShortCodeHandler.php, or is there a way to extend the plugin without editing the core files?
Thanks
Dave
Hi Dave, to answer your questions.
1) Currently the product links outputted are the values that are returned from the Product API, I’ll see about encoding the strings to utilize the entitity.
2) In the current version there is no caching of data returned from Amazon. This item is part of the next release that I am currently working on.
3) At the moment you would have to modify the ShortCodeHandler.php file. I have it on my future to-dos to do a template engine that would allow users to define their own widgets/ShortCodes but there are a few other enhancements that I plan to make first to the library.
Thanks for the feedback, If you have any other questions/concerns don’t hesitate to let me know.
Thanks for the info.
Regarding the unencoded ampersands, I remembered after posting my comment that this is due to a bug in libxml where entities are converted to characters even though they shouldn’t be. (I had the same problem before working with the ebay API).
If you see http://blog.hoofoo.net/2009/01/14/wordpress-patch-for-problamatic-libxml2-version/
they suggest checking LIBXML_DOTTED_VERSION to make sure it is a buggy version before applying the fix.
My access key and secret key are correct but I keep getting InValid in the plugin
Dolly, you are the second person that has notified me about having this issue. If possible can you generate a new secret/access key to utilize for yourself and send me (by email) the access/secret key combination that is not validating?
This way I can test to see if it validates on my Server and if not I can review the validation logic to find out where the issue is. Once we get the issue resolved then you can deactivate the access/secret key so that only you have access again to your AWS account.
Thanks Matthew,
I generated a new access key and it is still showing invalid, what email address should I send it to
Dolly please use matt@mdbitz.com
Hi Matthew, great plugin but I am also getting an ‘invalid credentials’. The only time the plugin accepts my credentials is when the WordPress site on which the plugin is installed matches the URL in my Amazon.com Account > Personal Information profile. Unfortunately this profile only allows you to enter one domain URL.
Hope this can be fixed 🙂
Linda, thanks for the additional details and insight into this issue. Are the two wordpress sites in question running on the same hosting service? I want to make sure I can rule out any differences that I can, I’ll take a look into the Amazon Profile and see if that turns up anything.
Hi Matthew, yes, they are both on Hostmonster.
Good luck
Linda
Hi Matt,
Looks like I signed up for the S# feature, should I have signed up for a different product in Amazon?
Dolly, you don’t need to sign-up for any products. The Product Advertising API is free and all you need is an account with Amazon Web Services to get your valid access/secret keys and you should be all set.
Thanks,
i un-installed the plug in and reinstalled it again but same invalid error
I am able to login with the S3 browser but not the plug in, is it cached?
I am excited to use this plug-in. However, I keep getting a message at the top of the page that says “WordPress Amazon Associate: Plugin is not configured! Please correct in the settings page”
Is there a place where I can see how to correctly configure the plug-in?
thank you,
Lisa
Lisa:
The message is shown because you haven’t configured the plugin with your Amazon Web Services Access and Secret Keys. This can be done on the settings page found by selected the WP – Amazon admin menu option. If you aren’t signed up with Amazon Web Services there is a link on the page you can use to register with them and get your access credentials.
Thank you for the plugin. The Amazon MP3 Clips widget is working fine; however, when adding the shortcode to a post, it only displays “Best Selling Amazon MP3 Clips”.
The tags appear correct in my editor:
(bracket)amazon_mp3_clips widget_type=”ASINlist” width=”250″ height=”250″ title=”Chritmas Music” market_place=”US” shuffle_tracks=”False” max_results=”” asin=”B000XSVRTC, B0013D8CZS, B000W196ZC” (closed bracket)
But when I do a “view source” on the published page, I see: title:”Best Selling Amazon MP3 Clips”.
I’m viewing my site on a Windows XP machine using the current version of Firefox. The post referenced can be found here: http://mellomoose.com/blog/chritmas-music/.
Any help is greatly appreciated, and again, thank you.
– Jeff
Jeff:
I just tested the ShortCode you entered and in my website (version 1.3.0) of the plugin it sets the title correctly. Also when viewing your website on firefox, and Internet Explorer it is correctly displaying the widget’s title as Chritmas Music. I’m not sure why your source is showing you differently but the widget is working correctly.
> Matthew J. Denton
Thanks for checking it out.
Yes, the title is displaying correctly now on my site too (probably needed a refresh), but the real problem is that I want it to display music based on the ASIN number of some albums (the same albums that cycle in the widget on the right sidebar), but it’s displaying best selling mp3 content, ignoring the “widget_type” tag and ASIN numbers (I was confusing the title for widget_type in the initial comment).
Basically, I’m getting the wrong music.
Sorry to be a pest, and again, I really appreciate your help.
– Jeff
Version 1.3.1 is now available, updating should correct this. Thanks again Jeff for pointing this out to me.
P.S. The type is case sensitive as well so it needs to be ASINList (capital L)
Hi Matt,
A great plugin! I am using it for the first time 🙂
How do I actually modify this code: to show a specific category (sub category) and change the title?
I can’t seem to understand the correct format to change the ‘$args’ part to show the stuff I want.
I hope you’ll be able to find some time to help me 🙂
Thanks!
Hi John:
Which Widget are you trying to utilize? To see the list of all options for any supported widget please visit the detailed pages on this website. On them you will be presented with a list of all applicable options and what values that it expects. For example details on the Carousel Widget can be found here.
Please let me know if you have any questions on the arguments themselves.
Thanks for your reply!
I am trying to use the carousel widget directly on the template file.
But I can’t seem to modify the settings in the code (like change the title and category).
AmazonWidget::Carousel( $args ); – Can you tell me the correct format on how to add specifics like title, categories etc?
Thanks again!
John you can find all the details on the Amazon Carousel Widget Page. The function takes an associate array of key value pairs. For example:
Hi I can’t find my amazon associates widget there is a message
asking me to config it in setting I not sure what to do in setting. you answer about me may add some light to the subject
Charles:
The WordPress Amazon Associate (WPAA) plugin settings can be found in the WP – Amazon top level menu item within WordPress’ Admin Console. In the settings you can insert your Associate Id and Amazon Web Services Keys, which are necessary to do product searching and amazon product links. If you simply want to utilize the supported Amazon Widgets you can go into Appearance > Widgets and add them to your website’s sidebar.
Let me know if you need any additional information.
That did it! Thank you, sir.
I was rockin this plugin but everything came to a sudden halt when I discovered that having too many links caused the post to not display. What?
The title, postmetadata, tags etc would show up but the post entry itself was missing. Take away one link and it all comes back. Not sure what’s going on. There’s not even anything in the HTLML.
I have about 14 links (it’s a gift-guide post) and adding one more causes the post entry to vanish.
UPDATE it appears that any additional text, not merely a link, somehow bombs my post. Not sure if that’s related to your plugin or not. Any ideas welcome.
David, If possible can you send me the content you have in your post’s content? If you prefer email it to me at matt@mdbitz.com. I’ll load it up in one of my test sites and see if I can help determine what the underlying issue is.
David,
Wanted to let you know that I found the underlying cause of the issue you are experiencing. As it turns out there is a defect in the WordPress shortcode_unautop function that is causing your content to return as an empty string. I have opened a bug with WordPress on the issue, but in the mean time if you add the following code to inside the init method of WPAA it will resolve the issue until a permanent fix is available.
remove_filter('the_content', 'shortcode_unautop');That did the trick. Thanks!
Hi there,
I’m trying to update my theme with the Carousel PHP code which is successfully showing.
The only problem is that the carousel that is showing has not got geographically contextual links, I am in the UK and it just displays amazon.com links.
Though when I implement the simple carousel method in my posts, it gives me the right links.
Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks and great contrib!
Currently version 1.2.X of the plugin does not support Geo Localization of Widgets. please use the marketPlace parameter to set the locale that the widget should use for product links. Version 1.3, which is currently in development, will support this feature.
Mathew…product preview not working fully with Google Chrome…shows empty Amazon border only.
With IE8, product preview flashes very quickly on screen and too soon it is gone.
Can you offer any suggestions?
Thanks.
Tony, thanks for bringing this to my attention you are correct that the product preview behaves strangely in IE8 and Chrome. These scripts are provided by Amazon and as such there isn’t much I can do about the issue, however I will keep an eye out for any updates Amazon makes so that the latest version is always available to you and other users of the WPAA plugin.
I just installed it on a test site and the widgets do not appear at all: http://wpc.1xx.info/
What did I wrong?
Karl, I just visited your test site and the Search Widget is showing for me, I used firefox. Can you confirm you have javascript and flash enabled and/or provide additional details on your test setup.
Hi Matthew,
I just installed it on my site and its working great. thanks for the wonderful plugin. keep up the great work! Mike
Hi,
I’m having some difficulties with the plugin:
1) On the Add New Post page, I inserted a link using the Amazon icon.
When I open the post in my browser I get the following error message.
Warning: curl_setopt() [function.curl-setopt]: CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when safe_mode is enabled or an open_basedir is set in /home/id4h7gkg/domains/mydomain.com/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate/APaPi/AmazonProduct/Request.php on line 191
However, the Product Link does works and the Preview window pops up nicely as well.
2) The Product Search function (New Post => Amazon Icon => Product Search) doesn’t seem to be working. I don’t get any results.
I’m using a fresh WP 3.0.1 install with the Twenty Ten theme.
I just found your plugin; looks promising. I hope you can help me solve my little problems or advise me on how to fix them.
Best regards,
Khun Cha
Khun Cha:
Thanks for notifying me to these issues. I plan to release a small update tomorrow (v 1.2.2) that should resolve issue #1. In the mean time if you comment out line 191 in the Request.php file found in the APaPi > AmazonProduct folder it will resolve that error.
The specific line in question is :
I’ll have to look into the 2nd issue in more detail, if you could let me know what locale you are set to as well as what you search for it could help me during my investigation.
Hi Matthew,
I made the changes to the Request.php file and now everything is working. Search results are showing up as well.
Thanks for helping me out 🙂
All the best,
Khun Cha
From today there’s a new Amazon store in Italy.
Thanks for the heads up. However until there is an affiliate program setup for Italy I don’t plan on adding it into the plugin.
The affiliate program for Italy is already started here: https://programma-affiliazione.amazon.it/gp/associates/network/main.html
Thanks for the link, The Italy locale doesn’t show up from the other Associate pages. In addition to Italy it also looks like there is a new China locale as well. However at this time they are not supported by the Amazon Product API, atleast as documented. I will do some testing and will see about incorporating the locales into the plugin.
If you add Italy ASAP I will set 25% to you 😛
… and a post to promote your plugin.
I’ve just run some tests and the Amazon Product API is not available for the Italy locale at this time. What this means is that it is not possible to do a lookup of a product’s url for Italy.
However at this time I will add in basic support to input associate tags and perform static link filtering for Italy and China Locales. Once Amazon updates the Product API I will enable the rest of the features.
Well, thank you.
Hey Matthew…works GREAT!
Thanks for your SUPER-effort…
I Love This Plugin!
Matthew,
I have removed the script from the footer…without success to the problem.
I appreciate your help.
Hi Tony, I had a chance to take a closer look at your website and found that making the following change enables product preview when you have the noConflict option selected.
In your header there is this piece of code
var J = jQuery.noConflict(); J(document).ready(function() {J('body').supersleight();});If you change that to
You will have to test if the supersleight plugin still functions after this change it should.
Hi Matthew…Thanks for your prompt reply.
Webpage: http://www.tinea-versicolor.net/treatment/
I do have the enhancer script pasted before in footer.php
Great update “ip2nation”
Thanks.
Tony, The plugin will include the script so you don’t have to add it to your footer manually. Try removing your inclusion of the script to see if it resolves the issue. If it doesn’t let me know and I will look into the issue closer however it seems like your site is including the same jquery version and contact form 7 scripts that I tested the fix on for my own website. I’m unfortunately not going to be on much today but I’ll take a closer look tomorrow, hopefully.
The product link or search only works with Amazon.com and not amazon.co.uk despite that the settings specifies UK.
Jim, I’ll have to look back through the locale selection to see if a flag is set incorrectly. In the mean time if you set locale=”UK” in the amazon_link shortcode it will render the amazon.co.uk product link with version 1.2.0.
Jim, please upgrade to version 1.2.0 this will resolve the product links always being from the amazon.com locale. In previous version I wasn’t setting the locale option on the underlying APaPi library. However in the most recent version this has been corrected and the tinyMCE search control will lookup products based on your primary locale. Please let me know if you still have issues.
Matthew…killer plugin if I could get it to function 100%
Have Access and Secret Keys valid…but still no product preview with either combination of checks for jQuery.
Any help appreciated.
Tony, Amazon’s Product Preview is a little touch and go due to how it includes it’s own version of jQuery. If you can direct me to the website you are planning to use the plugin on I could take a look at the page source to see if that gives any further details on the issue. If it isn’t available remotely if you give me the html source for a page I could take a look at that as well. Also please ensure your website utilizes the wp_footer method as that is where the amazon script is outputted.
I’ve configured the plugin but it still says “needs to be configured”.. any thoughts?
James:
If possible can you let me know what version of WordPress, PHP, and the Plugin you are using? There may be version compatibility issues as I haven’t had the opportunity to do version testing yet.
James, I’ve reviewed the plugin logic and the only reason you would see this message is if you have not configured the Amazon Web Services settings. The plugin does is built to show the error message only if no values are set for Access and Secret key. I will make a note to see if there is a better way to handle this for users that don’t have Amazon Web Services accounts and plan only to use the Amazon Widgets.
I using WPAA version 1.1.0 & Word Press Version 3.0.1
Anythougts?
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in /hermes/bosweb/web083/b831/ipw.aggregat/public_html/compuali/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate/WPAA.php on line 49
Ben:
Hi, sorry for not responding earlier. I’ve reviewed the above error and unfortunately it is because I use the static keyword of php5. What this means is the plugin is not compatible with php4. I currently don’t have any plans to make it php4 compatible and will make sure to update the notes on WordPress and here to specify php5 is required for the plugin.
Thanks and sorry to disappoint.
Any fix for this?
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in /homepages/28/d292228591/htdocs/blog/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate/WPAA.php on line 49
Andy, Can you provide additional details on the above error? In particular which version of PHP, WordPress and the plugin are you using?
Thanks,
> Matthew J. Denton
I can’t figure out how to get access and secret keys out of Amazon. Any help on where to find documentation would be greatly appreciated.
Tony:
The Access and Secret Keys are part of the Amazon Web Services and not the Associates program. You can sign-up for an account at http://aws.amazon.com/. Once you have created an account log-in and go to Account > Security Credentials and you will find your access keys.
Please note that the Access keys are not needed for displaying Amazon Widgets but are needed to search for and render amazon product images and links through the tinyMCE button and [amazon_link] short code.