Fetch more than one image

Hi,

The plugin currently only finds the ‘primary’ image returned from the Amazon Web Service. I see that there are also other ‘image sets’ called ‘variants’ that could also be returned.

I could probably create an add-on that will grab all the variant images but the way that they are displayed would be very particular to each user.

Had you any ideas on how you would give a consistent product post? Bearing in mind there would be varying numbers of images returned?

I could just return the ‘variant’ images as a unordered list and you wrap it in a div and use css to style it how you want?

Might be able to update the plugin to have a modifier that returns the ‘Nth’ image in the template e.g. %IMAGE%2# returns the second ‘variant’ image.

Any ideas?

Paul

Hi Mike,

I can help provide the mechanics to do what you want, but CSS and Javascript really isn’t my area of expertise. I think what you want would involve some quite complex css and scripting (See this page for an example).

If you could produce a template that duplicated something like this (or perhaps build most of it into your theme) , then all the plugin needs to provide is a comma separated list of images. Might need some way of creating a unique ‘id’ for the image that is being updated in case more than one ‘gallery’ is shown on a page.

So I guess what we need to make this work are:

1. An addin to retrieve all the variant images,
2. an option to limit the maximum returned or make it template specific.
3. An option to describe how each IMAGE should be expanded

The last one would just use the current template syntax but repeat it for each IMAGE
e.g. "%IMAGE%", for a comma sep list or
<li><a href="%IMAGE%"><img class="thumbnail" src="%IMAGE%"></a></li> for something a bit more complex. Where %IMAGE% expands to be IMAGE 1 to N.

Any more ideas?

Paul

Hi,

I’ve uploaded the beta version of this change to the development version of the plugin which can be downloaded from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/amazon-link.zip.

I’ve knocked together a plugin to extend the functionality to do roughly what you want, a version of this can be grabbed from here:

http://www.houseindorset.co.uk/amazon-link-images.php.txt

Adds an option ‘max_images’ to limit the number of images processed.
Adds an option ‘image_template’ that can be used to set the HTML returned as the plugin processes each image/thumbnail.

Adds the keywords ‘%IMAGES%’ and ‘%THUMBS%’ that cause it to expand the ‘image_template’ for each IMAGE URL or THUMB URL found.

This Template supports all the usual plugin keywords, except the keyword ‘%IMAGE%’ will be replaced with each successive image url, and %IMAGE_INDEX% will be replaced with the array index of each image. (Note the same keywords are used in both THUMBS and IMAGES).

Currently the same functionality is used to expand the THUMBS and IMAGES keywords, would be quite easy to copy and paste the function to have one for THUMBS and one for IMAGES and add another option for ‘thumb_template’.

Alternatively you can always set the template in the shortcode for simple templates e.g. [amazon asin=0123456789&image_template="%IMAGE%",&template=image_javascript]. Although I haven’t tested that option!

Paul

Hi Mike,

I’m just in the middle of trying to re-factor the code to make it useful for other features, so can’t offer a quick fix at the moment.

However couple of things that might have an impact with 1:

If you have uploaded the cover image to your own media library the plugin may display both the local image and the Amazon image.

I’ve noticed that if the product has a ‘Look Inside’ option then I get two images (frustratingly the look inside one is first and only supports a low resolution small image, so usually is picked by default by the plugin!).

Which ASIN was giving the problem?

It would be relatively simple to filter if the URLs are indeed identical, in the function ‘alx_images_process_images‘ just change the last line to:

return array_unique($data);

2. The version you have will change the %IMAGE% keyword in the sub-template to the appropriate THUMB url _only_ if it is being processed for the %THUMBS% keyword. However if you want to expand both %IMAGE% and %THUMB% in the same sub-template then you could try changing the code in the alx_images_display_images function:

Change the line:

$output .= str_replace( array('%IMAGE%', '%IMAGE_INDEX%'), array($image,$index), $input);

to read:

$output .= str_replace( array('%IMAGE%', '%THUMB%', '%IMAGE_INDEX%'), array($image,$data[$country]['thumb'][$index], $index), $input);

Note: I haven’t tested either of these changes!

Cheers,

Paul

Hi Mike,

Looks great!

I’d be tempted to change the IMAGE_INDEX to range from 1..N rather than 0..N.

Simply change:

$output .= str_replace( array('%IMAGE%', '%THUMB%', '%IMAGE_INDEX%'), array($image,$data[$country]['thumb'][$index], $index), $input);

to:

$output .= str_replace( array('%IMAGE%', '%THUMB%', '%IMAGE_INDEX%'), array($image,$data[$country]['thumb'][$index], $index+1), $input);

Glad you got it working, once I’ve finalised how the plugin will do this stuff in the next version I’ll drop you a new version of the ‘amazon-link-images.php’ file in case you want to upgrade.

Cheers,

Paul

The amazon-link-images.php plugin is included in the amazon link extras page, for the new version (3.1.0).