Media Manager Beta4 and MTAmazon32
As soon as I wrote my post about installing Media Manager I realized that I needed to simplify things. Media Manager's dependency upon MTAmazon can't be helped for the time being, and MTAmazon is woefully out of date in regards to the MovableType platform. My first release of Media Manager had a dependency upon an MTAmazon-Compat plugin which simply helped bring the gap between MTAmazon and the MT3.2 platform. However, it is a pretty big gap and one thing that would have made installation of Media Manager easier was to simplify the installation and configuration of MTAmazon.
Thus, I created MTAmazon32 v1.0 which is a repackaging of MTAmazon (which is completely legal thanks for MTAmazon's open source license) in order to make it easier to install and configure.
Then I focused on making Media Manager Beta 4 to utlize MTAmazon32 as completely as possible. The result hopefully for everyone is an easier installation process of both Media Manager and MTAmazon.
How to Install MTAmazon32
- Download MTAmazon32.
- Unzip MTAmazon32 into your MovableType's plugins directory.
- Visit MT 3.2 System Overview > Plugins panel and edit the settings of MTAmazon32.
- Each blog will also need to edit is own MTAmazon32 settings by specifying the Amazon Associates ID you would like to use with that blog.
That's it. MTAmazon32 works just like MTAmazon in every other way - include MTAmazon's tagset library.
All that being said, Media Manager 1.0 Beta 4 now requires MTAmazon32 in order to operate. So once MTAmazon32 is installed, go ahead and proceed with Media Manager's installation. It should be a little simpler now.
Comments
Byrne,
For some reason, I've never been able to successfully run mmanager.cgi. I've tried all of the versions since Beta 1 and I just get "500" errors. With my current configuration (MT 3.2 Beta 2, MM Beta 4), when I try to run it from the command line, here's what I get:
grettir@wubba% perl -w mmanager.cgi
An error occurred:
Loading template 'login.tmpl' failed: HTML::Template->new() : Cannot open included file header-popup.tmpl : file not found. at ../../extlib/HTML/Template.pm line 2024.
Perhaps there's just something funky about my configuration, but I thought I'd put it out there in case anyone else is having the same problems...
Posted by: Grettir | July 22, 2005 10:45 PM
The biggest barrier to using MTAmazon, and therefore BookQueueToo was that MTAmazon required several Perl modules installed that aren't part of the basic MT install - XML::Parser and XML::Simple for example. Does MTAmazon32 require those same modules? If so, I would suggest making that more explicit in your documentation. If not, alleluia. My web host is unwilling to install those modules and this has kept me from being able to use these plugins.
Posted by: elise | July 24, 2005 1:40 PM
Thanks so much for the feedback guys. First, I will see if I can't package XML::Parser and XML::Simple with MTAmazon32. That of course is an excellent idea. I am trying hard to make installation as easy as possible. I may even include an install script to copy files to the proper directories... but even so, that may be more difficult than it sounds on some hosts.
As for the error reported above... I have seen that before, but I am not entirely sure as to the root cause. My hypothesis is that I am creating my own template search path, which may result in an a change that screws up MT::App template searching capabilities (i.e. you need to login, or there was an error, etc.) I will investigate this more.
Posted by: Byrne Reese | July 25, 2005 2:05 PM