MDBitz Project Laboratory

Lately I’ve had some back and forth with the WordPress members that “oversee” the plugin repository. At the moment I am slightly annoyed at the way they go about “managing” the repository but I’ll leave that for another post.

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 … Continue Reading

Last year I created the WordPress-Amazon-Associate plugin to make the inclusion of Amazon links and Widgets simpler and more efficient. Since then I’ve made numerous enhancements all in the hopes that users would find it as useful as I do. To date their have been over 30,000 downloads of WPAA and overall great feedback from those that use it.

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 … Continue Reading

Well, as it turns out version 1.3.0 was not the last release of the 1.X branch. Let me announce that Version 1.4.0 of the WordPress Amazon Associate Plugin has been released!

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 … Continue Reading

Today is a momentous occasion for us, and it is all thanks to you! As of early this morning the WordPress Amazon Associate plugin has reached 5,000 downloads according to official WordPress plugin statistics. I never imagined that this plugin would reach 5,000 downloads in less than a month.

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 … Continue Reading

Today (December 3rd) we released version 1.3.0 of our WordPress plugin: WordPress Amazon Associate. We’re really excited about the new features that have been included in this release and think that you will be as well.

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 … Continue Reading

As you may have noticed there have been a few 1.2.x releases to the WordPress Amazon Associate Plugin over the last few days. In version 1.2.0 we introduced support for multiple Amazon locales and Geo localization of product links through the use of ip2nation.

After the release it was brought to my attention by Per Gustafsson, owner and maintainer of ip2nation that the plugin was making head requests to his server upon every page load of websites with the plugin installed. Upon receipt of this information we released version 1.2.1 that corrected the IP2Nation module … Continue Reading

Yesterday (11/14/2010) saw the release of Version 1.1.0 of the WordPress Amazon Associate plugin. I am very excited about this release as we feel a couple key features were introduced. First WPAA now fully support I18n localization and includes a .pot file that users can use to translate the plugin into their language. If you do create a translation please forward the po/mo files to me so I can include them for other users.

The second key feature we introduced with this release is the Compliance Module. This module enables the plugin to render ShortCode from other plugins within … Continue Reading

Some may already have noticed but this past Monday we released the WordPress Amazon Associate plugin for WordPress. This stream-linef plugin is built with the purpose of enabling you to quickly and easily take full advantage of all the widgets and feature that Amazon makes available to associates, and of course monetize your website while doing so.

I won’t take the time to list through all the features this plugin offers but instead, I’ll simply say this: If you are an Amazon Associate and run a WordPress powered website then the WordPress Amazon Associate plugin … Continue Reading