Getting Started
This is a handy guide to help new Media Manager users get started once they have successfully installed this Movable Type plugin.
Install and Configure MTAmazon32
Unlike Media Manager's predecessor there are no special configuration variables for the plugin itself. However, Media Makes great use of another plugin that does need to be configured. That plugin is MTAmazon32. If you have not already installed it, stop and do so now. Installation is easy and requires only that its files get placed in the plugins/MTAmazon32 directory on your webserver.
Obtain an Amazon Web Services Subscriber Id
Once you have installed MTAmazon32, you must then obtain a Subscriber Id from Amazon Web Services. This "subscriber Id" is what gives you access to Amazon's product catalog. Obtaining a Subscriber Id is easy, just visit the following URL and following the instructions found there:
https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/registration/index.html
Take note of the Subscriber Id assigned to you. You will need to use it later.
Obtain an Amazon Associates Id
Now you will need to be become an Amazon Associate. Belonging to this program is what entitles you to earn referral fees for the customers you refer to Amazon. Signing up is free and easy. Just visit the url below and follow the instructions found there:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=3435371
Configure the MTAmazon32 Plugin
Assuming you have gotten this far, you now have an Associates Id and a Subscriber Id. Now it is time to plugin them into Movable Type. First click the "SYSTEM OVERVIEW" link at the top of every page in Movable Type. Then look for and click on the 
Plugins link in your left nav bar. You will then be taken to a list of all the plugins currently installed in your instance of Movable Type. Look for "MTAmazon32" and click on its 
Show Settings link.
Enter in the Subscriber Id you received from Amazon in the space provided. This Subscriber Id enables all the blogs in the current instance of Movable Type to speak with Amazon's Web Services. This need only be entered once for the entire system.
However, each weblog has the option of providing its own distinct Associates Id. To configure a weblog, select it in the pull down menu located at the top of every page and click "Go." Then click the 
Settings link located in the left nav bar. Then click the "Plugins" tab located on the far right (you should find it right next to "IP Banning"). Look for "MTAmazon32" and click on its Show Settings link.
Finally, enter in your Amazon Associates Id in the place provided. You can enter in a different Associates Id for each blog in your system.
Begin Using Media Manager
You are all done. You should be able to start using Media Manager. To do so, look for the "Edit My Media Queue" located on every weblog's homepage.
To begin adding items to your Queue, just click the "Add Item" link. From that point forward, I would hope it is pretty easy...
Publish Items to Your Blog
Now that your queue has tons of items, why not start publishing them to your weblog?
For a quick start, copy and paste the following code in your weblog to produce a "Currently Reading" list:
<h2>What I Am Reading</h2>
<MTMediaManagerItems status="reading" sort_order="descend"
sort_by="modified_on" catalog="Books">
<div class="amazonItem">
<MTAmazon method="Asin" search="[MTItemASIN]">
<a href="<MTAmazonLink>">
<img src="<MTAmazonSmallImage>" border="0"
alt="<MTAmazonTitle>" />
</a>
<p><a href="<MTAmazonLink>">
<MTAmazonTitle></a><br />
by <MTAmazonAuthor></p>
</MTAmazon>
</div>
</MTMediaManagerItems>
Once you are comfortable with the above, consult the tag reference and try your hand at more complicated lists and use of Media Manager template tags.
Comments
Can the thing use amazon.co.uk?
Is it possible to use it on both .co.uk and .com
e.g.
(a href="UKLink")stuff(/a)(a href="USLink")bitoftext(/a)
?
Posted by: Murky | August 29, 2005 4:30 AM
Please clarify the mtamazon32 placement. Does it go in the plugins directory or does it go in the plugins\mtamazon32 directory? I have been running it in the plugins directory since bookqueuetoo and its seems to find it and set it up correctly.
Posted by: Tommy | August 29, 2005 6:55 AM
Hi. Looking forward to trying Media Manager out.
Installed it. Am in my MT blog, looking at the Add Item screen. No matter what I type into the search box, I get no results. And yes I have MT Amazon 32 installed, with my subscriber ID in there.
Thoughts?
Thanks. Ian
Posted by: Ian Christie | August 29, 2005 5:32 PM
I have upgraded to MTAmazon 1.1 and the latest MM beta and I have the same issue as Ian.
Posted by: Stephen Collins | August 29, 2005 6:59 PM
Ian & Stephen,
I had a similar problem with the latest download - trying a different subscriber id should solve the problem. If you need one I can provide you with one.
Nick.
Posted by: nickpunter | August 30, 2005 8:52 AM
I've done everything as directed and everything works on the back-end. However, anything I add to my list doesn't show on my blog. It seems as if the tags don't work. What am I doin' wrong?!
Posted by: DamnClown | August 30, 2005 7:33 PM
DamnClown,
Are you using the code in the above post? If so, have you marked items in your list as "reading" (you can edit this by clicking edit item and the option will appear there).
Nick.
Posted by: nickpunter | August 30, 2005 10:16 PM
Hi, I've just installed Media Manager. I get an error message every time I search for a book in the Media Manager interface.
This is the error: "You were no items returned in your search." I get this if I search for anything.
I installed media manager by downloading the files to my desktop unzipping them and then uploading them to my ftp server and changing the permission on mmanager.cgi to 755.
I don't know if that might be the prob.
Jason
Posted by: SFDagger26 | September 2, 2005 2:37 PM
Ugh...No comment Nick.
Don't I feel like a moron.
Posted by: DamnClown | September 2, 2005 7:00 PM
I've installed everything and entering items into the queue seems to work...until I click to REBUILD and I get
The requested URL /mtmt.cgi was not found on this server.
There are no books showing up on my index page! I have marked everything in the queue as "reading."
Posted by: Diane | September 8, 2005 6:03 PM
I am getting and error. My search works, but when I click on the item to add it to my Queue, i get
An error occurred:
File does not exist: Error retreiving Amazon info: at lib/MT/Plugin/MediaManager/App.pm line 1158
Does anyone know what this error might be? Thank fo ryour help!
Posted by: Chilean | September 12, 2005 1:15 PM
I have solved my own problem. I've been playing with this so much now that I forgot how I fixed it. :)
Posted by: Chilean | September 12, 2005 2:30 PM
Well, I don't know what happened, because I didn't change anything, but the books are now appearing in my sidebar.
Posted by: Diane | September 12, 2005 9:31 PM
I have finally buckled under and installed this thing.
Everything seems to be fine, I've put in the AWS code (obtained at amazon.com), the associate ID, selected UK site.
I have MTAmazon32v1.1 in there, beta 8 of MM.
I go to add my first item (do I add by ISBN or just search?) No results. Give ISBN, no results, go more general, search for stargate dvd, nothing, search for west wing, nada, search for french. Nowt.
I have to be missing something obvious, is there some sort of diagnostic I can do to see if it is connecting properly and to find the point of failure?
The only thing I can think of is that .co.uk and .com have different AWS codes.
Posted by: Murky | September 18, 2005 2:53 AM
Oh, and the link to the online troubleshooting guide returns an empty page (obviously this can be fixed with a redirect on the server)
Posted by: Murky | September 18, 2005 3:05 AM
Oooh, this plugin is great! I've been coming here for about two days, reading posts and comments tryig to figure out why I were returned zero results in my MM queue. Well, I finally found it, thanks by a comment by nickpunter. I went and re-requested my subscription ID and noticed it was missing the last number (sometimes copy/paste isn't your friend). So, for anyone who's having trouble, check your numbers, throughly. ;)
Thanks for this plugin so much.
Posted by: Liz | September 20, 2005 6:19 PM
I keep getting this error: "An error occurred:
Unknown action review"
Any ideas?
Posted by: amishrobot | September 23, 2005 11:09 PM
I installed MTAmazon32 and Media Manager. Configured MTAmazazon and MediaManager shows up on my plug-ins page. However, when I click on the Media Manager tab on the left nav bar I get the following error:
Got an error: Can't locate MediaManager/App.pm in @INC (@INC contains: E:\webs\peakjournal.com\wwwroot\cgi-bin\mt\extlib lib ../../lib C:/Perl/lib C:/Perl/site/lib .) at (eval 2) line 1
Any ideas?
Posted by: PeakJournal | September 29, 2005 3:34 PM
I've installed MediaManager (& MTAmazon32) first on my test blog last night, and then on my main blog tonight, including permissions, subscriber ID and associate-ID.
On the test blog: Last night I added about 15 items, which showed up in the queue, but tonight only one of them is present in the queue.
On the main blog: I added 7 items, changed the display options, and all the items disappeared. It now says the queue is empty. At this stage it does not matter whether I try to add them by author or title, or by ASIN, I get the right results, I select Add to Queue (both methods have been tried), it just takes me back to the MediaManager main page, telling me the queue is empty.
I am (successfully) running MT 3.2 on Fedora.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Posted by: Sivani | September 30, 2005 10:23 PM
It occurs to me that I should have mentioned I installed Beta 12/RC1.
Also, with the weekend ahead, I won't be able to check my work email until Monday and so, in the the event that you might respond, a line at my hotmail address to "ksivani" would be more useful.
I appreciate any help.
Thanks,
Posted by: Sivani | September 30, 2005 10:36 PM
Sorry for being a total newbie but where exactly do I paste the HTML for a currently reading list?
If I paste the code into a blog entry a get a mish-mash of code and weird links.
I suppose it's obvious but this is my first go at this kind of thing :)
Regards, Jonas
Posted by: JonzieBoy | October 10, 2005 2:11 AM
When I click, "Edit MyMediaQueue" I get a 500 Internal Server Error. Experimenting, I tried CHMOD it to 755 if it would do anything, and then it gave me the error that MTAmazon was not installed which is installed in both my MTHome and Plugins directory. I hope someone can help me get Media Manager running. Thank you.
Posted by: Athena | January 1, 2006 2:04 PM
I've having problems getting Media Manager to load. I've tried installing MTAmazon and MTAmazon32, but I get this error whenever I try to run the media manager plugin:
Got an error: It appears that you do not have MTAmazon installed. That is a prerequisite for Media Manager. Please consult the installation instructions. at /var/www/cgi-bin/mt3/plugins/MediaManager/lib/MediaManager/Util.pm line 26.
It looks like it's not picking up the package name properly or something. At a loss on how to proceed. Anyone see anything like this?
Posted by: Joshua Archer | January 9, 2006 12:25 AM
I'm having same problem Joshua Archer is having. Any insights?
Posted by: John M. Fox | January 15, 2006 1:50 PM
Hi, When I click on "Edit My Media Queue", I get the following CGI Error: "The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of HTTP headers."
Any thoughts? Thank you very much. This is a great tool!
Posted by: thegreenpages | January 18, 2006 10:51 PM
I'm not getting any errors and I'm finding books and adding them to me Queu. So my error is minor but when I enter Media Manager the layout is all messy like it isn't looking to the right places for layout images of the administrative interface. Any ideas?
Posted by: Seamus | February 26, 2006 11:49 AM
well, ignore my last post as I somehow overlooked the need to configure my static address. done.
Posted by: Seamus | February 26, 2006 12:32 PM
I so want to use MM, but I cannot even get to the settings screen and enter my subscriber ID.
MTAmazon shows up as MTAmazon/MTAmazon.pl and not MTAmazon32
This happens with the files downloaded through the sidebar download link for both MM and MTA
Posted by: Sara | March 7, 2006 1:47 PM
To further add to my comment above..
For MTAmazon I only get the enable/disable button and show resources on the right. Nothing else.
I'm currently trying with MTAmazon-3.0b2c which is the version getting through the dl link and MediaManager-1.0RC5b
Posted by: Sara | March 7, 2006 5:57 PM
I am having difficulty with posting items from my queue in the toys category. I was able to post read, unread, and reading items from my books queu but I tried doing the same thing for boardgames using the Toys category and I keep getting an error. I use basically the same text that I use for DVDs and Books but with category="Toys" and my index won't build. Does anyone know what I am doing wrong?
Posted by: Seamus | March 19, 2006 10:36 AM
Hello, I have the same problem as Athena: 500 configuration error. Any suggestions how to solve it? The plugins appear to be installed correctly, but maybe some other permissions have to be set? Thanks!
Posted by: chiara | March 20, 2006 1:03 PM
This maybe a unique way to try and use Media Manager, I'm not sure. Anyways, what I have been trying to do is to use the Media Manager template tags in my individual entries by using the Process Tags plugin by Adam Kalsey. The idea is that I read a lot of books. I don't really want to review them all, but I do like to list the books I've read in the last month or so, and to show what I am going to be reading soon. If I can tweat the template tags into working correctly through the process tags plugin, things should be groovy!
Posted by: Swift | April 3, 2006 6:19 PM
Install both MTAmazon 3.0 beta AND MTAmazon 1.3.3 at the same time. Setup both with Access Keys.
Media Manager will work then. Byrne should maybe update the install instructions :)
Posted by: Tommy @ dodoskido.com | April 20, 2006 9:42 PM
I also get the error
An error occurred:
File does not exist: Error retreiving Amazon info: at lib/MT/Plugin/MediaManager/App.pm line 1158
Posted by: groningen | June 5, 2006 3:40 AM