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!
