After some back and forth I was finally able to get the Plugin Guidelines that they use for determining if a plugin is qualified for the repository. In the hopes that other plugin developers don’t go through what I experienced I’m including it below. These Guidelines are as-is and as-of August 10th, 2011 the date I received them.

1. Your plugin must be GPLv2 Compatible. GPLv3-only is not allowed because it is incompatible with the GPLv2 and with WordPress itself. A “GPLv2 or later” license is acceptable, as this gives users the freedom to choose the GPLv3 if they want.

2. If you don’t specify a GPLv2-compatible license, then what you check will be considered to explicitly be GPLv2 code. By committing code to our repository at all, you accept this condition.

3. No obfuscated code. We believe that obfuscated code violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the GPL license under which we operate. The GPLv2 specifically states “The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.” Intentionally obfuscated code is not the preferred form, and not allowed in the repository under any circumstances. However, note that some systems, like Paypal donation buttons, use encoded code as part of their normal operating mechanism. This is not considered to be “obfuscated” as this is simply how these types of systems operate and it is not a choice by the plugin author. These types of things are acceptable, but may result in the author being questioned about it for edge cases. If a non-encoded method for such services is available, use it.

4. Trialware is not allowed in the repository. It’s perfectly fine to attempt to upsell the user on other products and features, but a) not in an annoying manner and b) not by disabling functionality after some time period.

5. Serviceware plugins are defined as plugins that merely act as an interface to some external third party service (eg. a video hosting site). Serviceware plugins ARE allowed in the repository, as long as the code in the plugin meets all other conditions. These are allowed even for pay services, as long as the service itself is doing something of substance. Creation of a “service” which does nothing put to provide keys or licenses or anything similar for the plugin, while the plugin does all the actual work, is prohibited. Moving arbitrary code into the service so that it can appear to do some work is also prohibited. This will be handled on a case by case basis and our judgment on any given case is final.

6. No “phoning home” without user’s informed consent.

a. No unauthorized collection of user data. For example, sending the admin’s email address back to your own servers without permission of user is not allowed. Asking the user for an email address and collecting if they choose to submit it is fine. All actions taken in this respect MUST be of the user’s doing, not automatically done by the plugin.

b. All images and scripts shown should be part of the plugin. These should be loaded locally. If the plugin does require that data is loaded from an external site (such as blocklists) this should be made clear in the plugin admin.

c. In general, things like banner or text link advertising should not be anywhere in a plugin, including on its settings screen. Advertising on settings screens is generally ineffective anyway, as ideally users rarely visit these screens, and the advertising is low quality because the ad-systems cannot see the page content to determine good ads. So they’re best just left off entirely. Putting links back to your own site or to your social-network-system of choice is fine. Furthermore, if the plugin does include advertising from a third party service, it must default to completely disabled, in order to prevent tracking information from being collected from the user without their consent.

7. No sending executable code via third-party systems. Use of third-party systems is acceptable in a service-client type of model, but sending actual PHP or other executable code over the network is considered a security risk. Executing outside code like this is not allowed except for specific and very carefully considered cases (such as during upgrades, for example).

8. The plugin most not do anything illegal, or be morally offensive. That’s subjective, we know. Tough. If we don’t like it for any reason, it’s gone. This includes spam, for whatever definition of spam we want to use.

9. You have to actually use the subversion repository we give you in order for your plugin to show up on this site. The WordPress Plugins Directory is a hosting site, not a listing site.

10. The plugin must not embed external links on the public site (like a “powered by” link) without explicitly asking the user’s permission. Any such options in the plugin must default to not showing the credit/link.

11. Plugin should not hijack the blog admin. It is fine to include an Upgrade prompt on the plugin admin page but not throughout the blog. It is acceptable to embed a widget on the dashboard but this should be the same size as others and be dismissable. It’s fine to put an error message at the top of the admin for special cases, but it should be linked to a way to fix the error and it should be infrequent. Any form of “nagging” is absolutely prohibited.

12. The plugin page in the directory should include no more than 12 tags. No sponsored links are permitted there. Using the names of other plugins as tags should be carefully considered.

13. Frequent commits can be seen as gaming the Recently Updated lists. Try to limit commits to prevent this. All commits should include a commit message describing the content of the commit, in reasonable detail. Frequent blank commit messages makes it hard for other developers and users to follow what is changing in the plugin. Blank commit messages may also be cause for rejection of the commit.

14. All code changes to a plugin that has a Stable Tag of “trunk” must result in the version number being upgraded. For the trunk and tags method, trunk can be continually updated without version number changes, while tags should generally not be updated ever past the initial tagging.

15. A complete plugin must be available at the time of submission. It would be appreciated if this is linked to in the plugin description.

16. We reserve the right to alter this list in the future. We reserve the right to arbitrarily disable or remove any plugin for any reason whatsoever. Basically, this is our repository, and we will attempt to maintain a standard of conduct and code quality. We may not always succeed, but that is our goal, and we will do whatever we feel is necessary in furtherance of that goal.

In my opinion there are some questionable items in the list, myself I fell afoul of #6 as I wanted to have actual statistics on usage of my plugin, which is something that WordPress itself does so still not sure why it is present in the guidelines for a no-no with plugins.

As I do not know when I will have the time to finish the Banner Management system I thought it would be worthwhile to do a minor release that includes 27 changes to the plugin ranging from code cleanup/optimization, plugin compatibility, Multi-User and Multi-Author Support, Bug Fixes and general administration changes. Below you will find a partial list of notable changes and as always for a full list of changes you can visit the project changelog.

Multi-Author Support

• New option to use Admin’s Associate ID for % of Author links
• Product Preview now supports usage of Author Associate ID

Plugin Compatibility

• WordTwit – renamed fancybox registration name
• wp-tables-reloaded – increased priority on Associate Filter to modify links after other plugins

Geo Localization

• Updated APaPi library to return error when ASIN is not valid for specified locale

Administration

• Administrator option to view content as specified locale
• Widget options migrated to own page
• Disable plugin features if AWS credentials are not entered.

Thanks everyone for your continued support, and please enjoy the plugin!!

I wanted to let you all know that version 2.0 of the WordPress-Amazon-Associate (WPAA) plugin is progressing smoothly. At this time I’m working on flushing out the last item on my task list for this release: inclusion of Amazon Banner Ads. I anticipate this to take another couple of weeks as I want to make sure that I think through the administrative interface completely prior to the release.

Some of the other changes made in this release include:

• Admin Settings Cleanup
• Widget & Product Styling Options
• Features disabled if AWS Credentials invalid or not entered
• Plugin code rewrite and optimization

If anyone has any feature requests make sure you send them my way in the next week or so to have them potentially included in the release.

Currently we are just getting started posting information and Tutorials on our WordPress Plugin WordPress-Amazon-Associate. If you utilize the plugin and would like to learn more information on it’s different features, report bugs or share other information then please do so at http://forums.mdbitz.com/.

Enjoy!!

Recently I came across an excellent article on WinkPress – The Best WordPress Amazon Associate Plugins. On it you will find a great overview and comparison of Amazon Associate plugins for WordPress both free and commercial. To my surprise and delight WPAA is mentioned along with Amazon PIP as the best Amazon Plugins for Bloggers! If you want to learn more about what plugins are available out there and their features than I urge you to read the article.

Thanks everyone for making WPAA such a huge success.

In this release Geo-Localization has been extended to support static amazon links within your website’s content. This means that you no longer have to update links to use the Shortcodes provided by the plugin instead the links will be automatically updated to the appropriate amazon locale with the correct associate tag based on the visitor’s IP Address.

As part of the localization process validation is performed on the generated link so that if the product does not exist for a locale the original link will be displayed to the viewer. In addition if you have disabled the visitor’s locale in the WP > Amazon > Settings admin page then the original link will be displayed making sure you maximize your return from the Amazon Associates Program.

To enable static link localization both Geo Localization and Associate Filtering must be enabled within the plugin settings.

As part of this release a few minor enhancements were made as well for support of Amazon Enhanced Ads and optimization to the Associate Filter logic. For full details please read the full project changelog.

Thanks as always for everyone’s continued support of the plugin!

Last week Ustad identified an issue where the insert product buttons of the Quick Links component was not inserting into the post/page content. Manuel then provided the necessary details on the error by pointing out that this issue occurred only when in the HTML editor mode. Thanks to this insight we were able to correct the issue by utilizing the send_to_editor JavaScript function that WordPress provides.

Today I received an email from Ariel asking if it would be possible to include alignment of Amazon Product Images so that inserted images will not cause breaks in content. After reviewing the code base I determined that although adding the align property is possible that it would be best instead to include a class attribute as align is deprecated. Therefore all amazon_image ShortCode can now be styled by use of the class attribute.

[amazon_image class="alignleft"]....[/amazon_image]

Looking at the site I notice that the content is sorely lacking when it comes to the amazon_link and amazon_image ShortCodes. Hopefully I will get some free time to get these documented shortly for everyone. Also as a side note development of Version 2.0 is well underway and it looks like it will also contain support for another Amazon Widget.

Happy Holidays ! ~ Matthew

This release incorporates a few key features that I think will open up the plugin to an even wider audience. First this releases includes a new Cache module. The Cache Module if enabled will save Product information returned from the Amazon Product API to a local database and will serve that content from the local copy instead of doing another request. The saved data is stored by locale so it will not cause any issues with the Geo Localization logic of the plugin. To make sure the product content stays up-to-date there is a built in expiration setting so that content older than x days will be updated from the Product Advertising API.

The second major update in this release is the inclusion of Multi-Author support. We’ve added in hooks to the user profile so that every author of your website can specify their Amazon Associate Tag. If their associate information is available all links/widgets in the content of the post/page that author created will contain their associate tags. This option like all other features is optional and can be disabled on the settings page if desired.

The last major enhancement in this release is the inclusion of a Quick Links component to the post/page edit pages. This component, available in the right sidebar, allows you to insert Amazon Products or Images in 2 quick steps. The tinyMCE button can still be used but will be modified in future release to enable advanced searching and options.

In addition to the above enhancements we made some general coding changes to remove PHP Notice messages that were being produced by the plugin. That is it for now, Version 2.0 isn’t expected to be out till next year but in the mean time if you have any questions/issues please don’t hesitate to let me know!

Thank you for your continued support, and look forward to these upcoming plugin enhancements in the near future.

• Multi-User Support – Associate Tags per Editor(User)
• Quick Links Sidebar – Enable 2 step insert of links and products from the page/post editor screen
• Amazon Banner and Ads Support

Again, Thank You! and please let us know if you have any questions, issues, or would like to request a feature.

Everybody loves widgets and in this release we have added support for the Amazon Omakase Widget. This widget (shown below) will render Amazon Products that have been optimized by Amazon for your website.

You can add this widget to your site through PHP, Short Code, The Widget Admin screen, or through the new extended tinyMCE control. As of 1.3.0 we have extended our custom tinyMCE editor into a drop down button that allows you to insert ShortCode for all supported widgets through an overlay config page with built in preview.

We further enhanced our widgets by enabling support for Geo Localization by IP Address. We introduced this feature for product links in version 1.2.0 and now we support it for widgets by setting the locale/marketPlace value to an empty string (ShortCode) or -Geo Localizaton- (UI).

This may be the last 1.X version of the plugin as we are currently working on the next major release. However there are a few items that may get released sooner as version 1.4 depending on how the new feature development proceeds.

In addition to the Widget enhancements made in this version we also stream-lined code and formatting of existing pages and removed the shortcode_unautop filter that will cause page content to be blank in some instances.

You can view the complete changelog for full details about the changes, download the plugin here or install it through your WordPress powered website.