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Project TInA - PHP Amazon Associates Script |
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Project TinA - PHP Amazon Associate Script
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Mambo site syndication
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Announcing the Launch of Project TinA
Announcing the launch of 'Project Tina' the website that will act as the hub for all things related to the TinA (Tina Is not Apf) Amazon Web Services script. Tina is PHP conversion / adaptation of MrRat's Amazon Products Feed script (http://www.mrrat.com/aws/) which for the last five years has been the leader in the field of not only Amazon Web Services scripts, but of Web Services scripts period. Like APF which was steered single-handedly by MrRat throughout its life - Tina is primarily a one man operation. The conversion of MrRat's Perl APF script to PHP has been undertaken by Dean Marshall (http://www.deanmarshall.co.uk/) who previously created and maintained a PHP 'bridge' application to link the Perl script with the PHP Content Management Systems Joomla and Mambo. PHP Amazon Store Script To Dean the need for a PHP implementation of the highly successful Amazon script was apparent - initially this was to make integration with Mambo and Joomla easier, more efficient and simply smoother for the end users. A number of requests from users of other CMSs and blogging platforms confirmed the idea that PHP was the way to go. Perl is a very flexible and very powerful language but it isn't user friendly and simply doesn't have the critical mass of PHP. More and more PHP is the language of choice for end users who perhaps 'dabble' in a bit of programming and who would like to offer customisations or simply make tweaks for their...
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Project TinA Background
Since 2004 Dean Marshall has been a helping moderate MrRat's support forums, offering code suggestions and implementing APF related solutions. MrRat listed me Dean as the 'official third party support' person and whilst MrRat's Amazon Products Feed (APF) script is easy enough for most people to implement for themselves there are always situations where some assistance is required with installation or troubleshooting and support work. Mambo, Joomla and Amazon Products Feed Following his discovery of the Mambo Content Management System and the subsequent fork of the project to become Joomla, Dean released a Mambo/Joomla component to integrate MrRat's APF script into sites powered by the popular CMSs. This quickly became the leading Amazon component within the Joomla / Mambo communities. But the 'APF bridge' was - and still is - a little awkward as the bridge makes a separate request out to the main APF script. As Mambo and Joomla are powered by PHP a growing interest in a less awkward PHP based solution was sparked. For the last few months Dean has been working feverishly in his spare time (not that he has much) - building on the fantastic work of MrRat. Put simply - it is his intention to release a version of MrRat's Amazon Products Feed script converted to PHP. Dean says:As you hopefully know already APF makes it easy for developers and web masters with little or no programming experience to build a personalised on-line store utilising Amazon's complete product catalogue. Website...
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Project Tina Development Roadmap
So far the Tina project has taken quite a slow path. We are hoping that from here on out things will start to gather pace and that with your help we can bring things to fruition that much more quickly. Anyway - here is what we think the next few months will look like - but please bear in mind that I have a habit of being optimistic in these matters, and a track record of unfinished projects ;) Right Now - Currently in progress (start of December 2007)Start building out the Project TinA website(s) December 2007continue bug squashing, converting remaining functions and working onthe plug-in systemJanuary 2008 Look at new features - what does an Amazon store script need to do today to compete with aStore and other scripts. End of January early February 2008 Private Beta plus announce project to world + dog February 2008 Develop end user documentation Prepare for first public beta End of February 2008 First public beta release March and April 2008 Bug squash in light of public beta feedback + Develop developer docs May 1st 2008 Official Release of Tina Version 1.0 I can't work out if this sounds ambitious or like slow going. Five months is a long time - but I think there is still a lot of work to do.
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Go PHP 5 - Project Tina is PHP5 only
Whilst acknowledging that at the time development was started PHP4 was the dominant version of PHP4 - particularly out in the shared hosting environment that it is anticipated the majority of our users will be utilising - PHP5 offers so many features that we as developers find appealing. Frankly it would have been twice as difficult to convert this script to PHP had PHP4 been the target platform. Whilst most of the internals could have been coded in PHP4 certain fundamental elements - such as our xml handling and our Object Oriented focus (not utilised much as yet) would simply have been too time consuming to do in PHP4 or worse still - would have required external libraries which would not have been available on the servers of our friends on shared hosting. For this reason we wholeheartedly back the 'Go PHP 5 (http://goPHP5.org/)' movement who are pushing for the widespread adoption of PHP5 throughout the scripting/programming and web hosting communities. The fact of the matter is that PHP5 has been out for THREE years - but because it wasn't supported widely programmers built PHP4 compatible scripts. Because most scripts were PHP4 compatible hosts didn't install PHP5 thus forcing future programmers to build for PHP4. Well, you can see where that leads right - stagnation. Project Tina recommends PHP5, and as we are in the unusual position of being both an established project and a new project at the same time we have chosen PHP5...
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