FREEBS Feature and Functionality Suggestions

[Greg]

Please post any features or functionality that you desire to be included in FREEBS in this thread.

Thanks

[jhughes]

Just keeping feature requests from me on the correct thread

* Remove duplicate ASIN
* Remove ASIN when price is "Too Low to Display"
* Remove ASIN when "Item not available"
* Nice SearchBrowse by keywords
* Easy way to grab and populate best selling items
* Cache for Images and descriptions to reduce load on Amazon
* Cache AutoDelete daily or after n000 hits

[Greg]

Originally Posted by jhughes

Just keeping feature requests from me on the correct thread

* Remove duplicate ASIN
* Remove ASIN when price is "Too Low to Display"
* Remove ASIN when "Item not available"
* Nice SearchBrowse by keywords
* Easy way to grab and populate best selling items
* Cache for Images and descriptions to reduce load on Amazon
* Cache AutoDelete daily or after n000 hits

Dupes are covered.

Have not encounted a too low to display yet to write code for that.

Items not available are excluded.

Search is later, but something will happen, the API is too easy to use.

Not sure on the best selling part. Tell me more.

The book medium image is the only image pulled from amazon.

Not sure what ya mean on the autodelete, tell me more.

The demo is up Genealogy Book Store

[jhughes]

Originally Posted by noppid

Have not encounted a too low to display yet to write code for that.

Example: Look at the price on this product
[url]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0007KX4SS/104-2078014-4361551[/url]

Originally Posted by noppid

Search is later, but something will happen, the API is too easy to use.

I am glad

Originally Posted by noppid

Not sure on the best selling part. Tell me more.

Every category has a Top Seller or Best Seller list.
It's every updated every hour for electronics and slower on some other categories (I think)
If you display this category or product from this category the chance of
the item missing (404 error) or the price incorrect is very high.

Something like a cron - job update or cache empty of special categories such as this.

Here is an example.
[url]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/new-for-you/top-sellers/-/electronics/226184/[/url]

Originally Posted by noppid

Not sure what ya mean on the autodelete, tell me more.

Related to above I guess if you get a 404 then to be able to handle it gracefully. If you keep items in the cache and someone clicks on an item no longer at Amazon it would be nice to
a.) Delete the item from the cache
b.) Take them to "Similar" products using the "category name" in a search
to browse similar items
c.) Alternatively use a cron job to remove cache files at a timed interval but if your site gets a lot of hits you can set it to every 2000 unique visits - just an iidea
Thank you very very much for putting the time and sharing the code

[Greg]

If you mean a hot items page in general, we can do that, maybe. However this is only supposed to be books currently. That's getting closer to store functionality. However I will look at the API calls available for that type search.

So far the book.php page does one SOAP call to the amazon AWS server. Then the client calls the amazon image server for the books medium image. I have added small images to similars. That's 5 more calls from the client to the amazon image server. But each image is about 2K, I don't see these fetches as overhead really. Especially compared to other store pages I've seen.

[Capn]

When I run the p3.php file, I get a 404 error and see ...\ap3.php in the address bar. This is only in 1.05. 1.04 seemed to work fine.

[Greg]

Originally Posted by Capn

When I run the p3.php file, I get a 404 error and see ...\ap3.php in the address bar. This is only in 1.05. 1.04 seemed to work fine.

Oh damn I see what I did. I'll fix it and issue a new release.

To fix it in the mean time, open p3.php and on line 27 change...

echo '<form action="ap3.php" method="post">

to...

echo '<form action="p3.php" method="post">

1.06 is posted.

Sorry for the problems and the post edit, I hit edit instead of quote.

[Greg]

p3.php has become too powerful. You can and if you're like me, you're trying to popluate the database with as many books as possible. Keep the Amazon TOS in mind when doing so. That's on you.

However this has brought up another issue. Book List pages with hundreds of books. These pages have too many links and they are well over 50k and even 100K in some cases. This is not good search engine food.

So, we have pagination. Check my FREEBS book stores for the example and let's hear some feedback.

Thanks

[Capn]

I think you've addressed this but wanted to bring it up. The "Similars" listings show external links to Amazon if the books aren't in that Bookshop. Could it be coded to show ALL "Similars" as internal links regardless of whether or not it's currently in our particular bookstore?

[Greg]

Originally Posted by Capn

I think you've addressed this but wanted to bring it up. The "Similars" listings show external links to Amazon. Could it be coded to show internal links instead?

Where we have the book on file we show a local link now. The image links are out going though.

The code to resolve similars not on file when displaying the book page could be quite a bit, so I doubt I'll do that. (ie. Check if sim is on file, look it up, store it, store it's similars and comments.)

Who knows, maybe one day. That would be pretty dynamic too. Let me think it out.