I’ve just wrapped up version 1.2 of the Amazon Showcase Wordpress Widget. Besides some minor updates improving performance, this release included a new “Template” option to satisfy a highly requested feature regarding output customization.

User’s now have the ability to define a “templates” for each item displayed. This provides total flexibility over the HTML that is generated and outputted in the widget. There are several pre-defined ‘tags’ that you can use within the templates as placeholders for product information. For example, any instance of the tag ‘[author]‘ in the template will be replaced by the product’s author name when outputted.

Head over to the Amazon Showcase Wordpress Widget project page for more information and to download; and of course, feel free to send me any comments or suggestions you have!

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Amazon Showcase is a Wordpress Widget for showcasing items from Amazon. Simply enter the ASIN/ISBN numbers of any products and optionally enter an Associate ID for earning commissions. The product image will be displayed with a link to the product detail page on Amazon.com.

New in Version 1.1:

• cURL is now supported and used if it is enabled in the server’s PHP configuration
• Integrated the fantastic simplexml44 library, a PHP4 backport of PHP5’s SimpleXML
• Added the ability to specify the Amazon locale (US, UK, FR, etc.) from which to pull items
• Added the ability to showcase up to ten items from Amazon’s catalog in the widget

A special thanks goes out to Gavin Gough and Christian Selvaratnam who both made fantastic feature requests and were invaluable in the testing and debugging process.

Enjoy and keep the feedback coming!

The BetterThumbs Wordpress Plugin creates true thumbnails for full-size images that are resized in the post editor, instead of just letting the browser scale down the original full-size image. This translates into faster load times and lower bandwidth usage.

I built this plugin out of frustration with the way Wordpress handles images that have been resized in the post editor. To be honest, I believe this functionality should be built into Wordpress — it just makes more sense to create true thumbnails based on the dimensions the author wants.

So enjoy and leave your feedback!