A minor update has been made to my Amazon Wishlist Plugin for WordPress. This update is not necessary for everybody, but here’s the change log:
- Added support for locales in US, UK, DE, JP, FR, CA
- Added support for displaying 1-10 items without navigation or test blurb
- Added ability to hide navigation, blurb, and product images
- Removed 90ms sleep that was used during testing
Also, some users have asked about some various functionality that they’d like to see in the plugin. Some requests have been to display a random item, sort by rating, or to sort by other parameters. I did a little research with the Amazon Web Service and the outlook isn’t so good on these requests. At least from Amazon’s end of things.
For one, I can only get 10 items back at a time from the web service (it’s an Amazon limit). So, I’d have to call each page of your wishlist (which could be up to 30) sort them manually by some criteria (e.g. rating) and then throw them back out at you. However, it gets more difficult than this, since for each item in the list another web service call has to be made to get the list item details. So, as an upper limit you could need to make 300 more web service calls to get the product information (title, urls, images, etc…). That could then, as an upper limit, require 330 web service calls. This is not only slow, but this would also take a lot of time to process on the server side (~1 second in render time per call). If this were to be done, another method would have to be used to store the XML and how I do my caching.
However, with that said, I do read all of your comments and try to add them to the plugin. So, if you have suggestions, please let me know and I’ll look into the feasibility of adding it to the plugin. My initial vision for this plugin has been accomplished, but I like hearing what the users of this plugin have to say. So, keep the comments coming!
The next thing that I am going to look into is calling the plugin for more than one wishlist ID. So, keep your eyes posted for that update. But, it might be a while now with the holiday season coming up as well as the end of the year. Rest assured, when I can find the time to think all of this through, I will.