Major Enhancements to Media Manager
I posted recently on ProNet about the various plugins I have written for Movable Type. After posting it I was quickly innundated with support requests. Guilt finally set in. I couldn’t let some of these bugs go. So I devoted my weekend to taking care of a long needed update to Media Manager: Release Candidate 5.
Warning: many of the enhancements and changes made may have backwards compatibility issues. So please read below for specific issues you should be aware of. I am truly sorry for this inconvenience. Normally I do my best to keep things backwards compatible, but these changes were absolutely necessary in order to make Media Manager simpler, faster and easier to maintain. Which at the end of the day means more features and enhancements, faster.
Listed below are the major changes in Media Manager RC5.
Support for MTAmazon 3.0
The biggest enhancement is that Media Manager has been rewritten to take advantage of MTAmazon 3.0’s new fandangled architecture. This has dramatically reduced the code complexity of Media Manager since now it has finally been written against an MTAmazon API that never really existed before. A little known fact that is the dependency between MTAmazon and Media Manager before RC5 was minimal at best. Media Manager actually replicated much of MTAmazon’s functionality because MTAmazon’s code base was not written with the ability of sharing its code with other plugins in mind. Well, that was finally rectified. Now Media Manager is slimmer, meaner and faster then ever before.
If you are using MTAmazon 1.3.3, or any version of MTAmazon32 for that matter, you may need to adjust some or your template code since MTAmazon 3.0’s template tags are completely different.
Access Keys - not Subscriber IDs
Amazon has discontinued support for Developer Tokens and Subscriber Ids which prevented many new users from being able to use this plugin. So MTAmazon 3.0 was built on top of Amazon’s new Access Key Id.
If you are upgrading please keep in mind that you will need to retrieve and enter into your plugin settings your Amazon Access Key Id.
Import[ant] Enhancements
A while ago I added the ability to import your Amazon Wishlist into Media Manager. However, it assumed you knew your somewhat obscure and difficult to find “Wishlist ID.” In RC5 however, you just need to enter your name, or email address and Media Manager will search for your list automatically. Then select the list that is yours and Media Manager will automatically import its contents into your queue. Could it get any easier?
User Interface Enhancements
I slightly modified the display of the expanded mode to make the list feel more balanced. Check it out:
Support for All Databases!
If you have been holding out from using Media Manager because Media Manager did not support your database, then wait no longer. If Movable Type supports your database, then so does Media Manager. That is because Media Manager now plugs into Movable Type’s upgrade API which is capable of auto generating table create and alter statements automagically, so that I don’t have to! Hallelujah!
The number of changes in this release is far too great to list in continued detail, so here is a complete change log for the release.
Complete Change Log
- I have finally chosen a license under which to distribute Media Manager: the Artistic License, or “the same terms as Perl itself.”
- Media Manager now requires the use MTAmazon 3.0.
- Removed local ‘loadmt32config’ subroutine and replaced it with call to MTAmazon’s readconfig.
- Media Manager now uses a built in function in the core MT that produces valid SQL for any supported database of the MT platform. There is no need for Media Manager to ship sql dump files any more.
- Removed all legacy Media Manager code that calls Amazon
- Modified pagination display of search results
- Removed ugly “Media Manager” page header - left only the search box
- Upgraded category pull down menu to include ALL categories from Amazon.
- Cleaned up display of items - images are now centered on as a background so that the expanded view appears more balanced.
- Added enhanced wishlist searching - search by name or email, then browse results, preview list, and import directly from Media Manager.
- Added new widget that is created for new installations of Media Manager: last 5 recently added items.
- Fixed long standing bug that resulted in an “install loop.” This was the result of Media Manager thinking it had successfully installed the required database tables, but in fact had not - thus kicking Media Manager into the install process again.
- Upgraded the HTML of auto-installed widgets to be inline with Movable Type’s default styles, class heirarchy and HTML structure.
Comments
Brilliant!! And a happy excuse to put off laundry for another day. I will have fun playing with the new and improved MediaManager today. ;-)
Posted by: kate | January 30, 2006 4:42 AM
What is this access key id? And why does Amazon keep changing the id systems?
Posted by: Lola | January 30, 2006 4:42 AM
Never mind - figured it out. By going into Amazon forum and finding a link, and logging into my Amazon account. I wish they'd make it more easy to retrieve this information by providing a link from the web services account page.
Posted by: Lola | January 30, 2006 4:54 AM
I tried installing RC5 and got an error while trying to access the MM settings. So, I removed MM and MT32 and reinstalled MT3b1, configured it and then installed MMRC5 again. I now get this errror:
An error occurred:
Undefined subroutine &MTAmazon3::Plugin::ItemLookupHelper called at /web/hd/viren.org/www/cgi-bin/mt/plugins/MediaManager/lib/MediaManager/App.pm line 210.
which very much looks like it's not finding that function. Well, I looked in the plugins/MTAmazon/lib/MTAmazon3/Plugin.pm file and there is no such function. What am I missing?
Posted by: Darkswordesque | January 31, 2006 9:27 AM
I've had this problem from RC1 through RC2 and now RC5 (haven't done 3&4).
I cannot get the MediaManager queue to display on my site(s). Those parts of the template code that start with MTItem... show up, and those that have MTAmazon do not.
I have modified in a minor way the code on the Getting Started page (the same is true for the "original code" as well.)
In any event, the result can be viewed at the bottom end of the right sidebar at http://andamu.org/books/ The desired result would be something like the lists in the left sidebar, which I laboriously construct and update by hand.
Thanks in advance for your help,
Sivani
PS: I should add that prior to the RCs, I couldn't get anything to show up at all, so at least this is progress :-)
Posted by: Sivani | February 6, 2006 1:01 PM
Grr.
Too much code for MT.
I will provide the code in email to any interested parties.
Thanks,
Sivani
Posted by: Sivani | February 6, 2006 1:03 PM
I'm getting the same error as Darkswordesque "Undefined subroutine &MTAmazon3::Plugin::ItemLookupHelper called at lib/MediaManager/App.pm line 210."
What's causing it?
Posted by: owen | February 12, 2006 3:06 PM
I'm getting the same error as Darkswordesque & owen Undefined subroutine &MTAmazon3::Plugin::ItemLookupHelper called at lib/MediaManager/App.pm line 393
Any help would be appreciated
Posted by: volcom | February 25, 2006 3:46 PM
I ran into the same ItemLookupHelper error some have pointed out above. I changed the code to call ItemLookup (without really taking any time to see if that made any sense whatsoever to be honest) and now I get the following error:
Can't call method "stash" on unblessed reference at /home/users/web/b675/hoc.gusperez/cgi-bin/plugins/MTAmazon/lib/MTAmazon3/Plugin.pm line 49.
Makes me want to learn MT's extensibility just to avoid feeling this helpless with plugins all the time.
Posted by: Gus Perez | March 10, 2006 8:12 PM
I am also getting the error message: An error occurred:
Undefined subroutine &MTAmazon3::Plugin::ItemLookupHelper called at lib/MediaManager/App.pm line 210.
I also needed to upgrade to Amazon3.0. I did this, but left the files for Amazon32 on the server.
Since I had a previous version of Media Manager, I downloaded the RC5, unzipped the files, copied them to the server following the instructions (I think). Then I just went into MT, selected the blog which has the Media Manager, and clicked Edit My Media Queue. The result was the error message previously stated. This modification only required an update to the files, correct? There are no database changes or scripts that need to be run, right?
Any help is greatly appreciated!
Posted by: Tanja | March 14, 2006 5:30 PM
"Undefined subroutine &MTAmazon3::Plugin::ItemLookupHelper called at lib/MediaManager/App.pm line 210.""
Has anyone figured this one out? I am getting this same error message.
Posted by: Tim Challies | April 20, 2006 9:38 AM