Learning the World

Oh, it’s confusing how often Amazon changes it’s product names and API. In my plugin the Help response group is used for key validation, alas recently it’s been deprecated. I need more time to look for an alternative. In the meantime you can hack it by adding a file amtap-aws-key-verification.txt in the wp-content/cache folder where the content is true.

Starting August 15th, the AWS Product Advertising API, as the former E-Commerce Service is now called, will only accept signed requests. The plugin will stop working if you don’t update. Thus I needed to re-engineer a few functions of my WordPress Amazon Machine Tags Plugin.

What you need to do is:

• Update to version 3.0 of the plugin.
• If you didn’t adapt any files just overwrite them. If you customized the CSS or XSL files, take care that you don’t overwrite yours. Also the XSL namespace must reflect the API version used in the plugin (2009-07-01), i.e. xmlns:aws= "http://webservices.amazon.com/ AWSECommerceService/ 2009-07-01"
• Get your Secret Access Key in addition to your existing Access Key ID. Your future requests will be signed using the secret key.
• Go to the plugin’s admin interface and enter the secret key.
• Some people experienced a few minutes where the items didn’t show up, instead they got the untransformed XML code. After a few minutes the problem resolved itself. My guess is that Amazon cached the XSL files, the versions mismatched, therefore the XML wasn’t transformed. That’s why I renamed the XSL files so that the new ones will be used. If you want to be sure, also delete the cached files amtap-aws-items-for-post-*.html in your wp-content/cache directory.

If you encounter any problems with the update, re-install the old version and let me know what went wrong so that we can fix it together until August 15th.

You can also support the plugin by translating it. There’s an empty PO file in the package. With a tool such as Poedit it’s fairly easy to translate everything. Thanks. 😉