The Amazon chooser is a foundation plugin to access the Amazon Webservices. Those can be used to retrieve information of products sold on Amazon. You can use those pieces of information to link to amazon products, to make suggestions or also to power your Affiliate Business as an Amazon partner.
This plugin will add a custom button to the Serendipity Entry Manager. When you create an entry, you will see an extra button that allows you to pick from the amazon product list, and in the end attach the selected amazon product to your blog entry.
To use this plugin, you will need an Amazon API key, and your webserver/firewall needs to be allowed to connect to the Amazon servers. This plugin also needs at least Serendipity 1.4.1, so it can register custom toolbar buttons easily.
An API key is a unique string that you receive from Amazon to identify you and your blog. This allows them to track your referalls, possible affiliate actions, and traffic usage. Be sure to read the Amazon Terms of Use to see what you can and cannot do with their API.
Previously, Amazon did not require you to use personal API key. Since August 15th, 2009, it is a requirement to be able to use the Amazon database.
To apply to an Amazon API key, visit the site aws.Amazon.com and register yourself. They will need your name, e-mail adress, contact information.
After registration, you can find your access credentials on the "Your Account > Access Identifiers" subpage (direct link).
To apply for a Associate ID (the Affiliate marketing program) you need to visit the dedicated website from Amazon ("Amazon.com Associates Central") and sign up there as well. The key will also be found on your Affiliate Account page then.
The Amazon-Chooser Serendipity-Plugin can be installed normalle through Spartacus, or by putting the plugin inside the plugins/ subdirectory, and installing it through the Serendipity Administration Suite in the Plugin Configuration, by clicking on "Click here to install an EVENT plugin".
Once installed, you can configure the plugin by clicking on the title of it in the listing inside the Plugin Configuration. You will now need to configure a few things:
When you create a blog entry, you can click on the Amazon media button (also in WYSIWYG-mode) to open a popup window. There you can search for a book or specific media, and get a list of search results. On that page, you can pick your item to display. Once you did that, and confirmed your pick, it will get inserted into the blog entry with a markup like:
[amazon_chooser]32423434X,Books[/amazon_chooser]
This markup will be replaced with the Amazon product information, when visitors view your blog. This is done automatically, so that prices etc. are updated automatically. You can also insert markup like this manually in your blog entry, if you know the ASINs already.
The results of an amazon request are cached for an hour. Search results inside the backend are cached for 12 hours. If you want to "purge" your cache, simply delete all files inside your templates_c/amazonchooser/ directory. WYSIWYG