I’ve been playing with Zend_Service_Amazon (part of Zend Framework) for a while and I find the class pretty good, except there is no cart creation class and some other minor stuff. Yet, it’s still a great class to use on your production sites. (Click here if you want to see the demo already)
I found some “bugs” if you may call it that, for example when getting the images, you will have to assign them to a variable, you cannot echo it directly like $Item->LargeImage->Url because it will throw a catchable fatal error and complain that it cannot convert to string.
Anyway! Let’s get started, I found a popular jQuery plug-in called galleria. This plug-in allows you to create a neat presentation of your gallery. It’s really nice, and very easy to use. I’m not really a javascript guru and well my knowledge in javascript is pretty limited.
So the presentation that galleria delivered and the idea of having a better way to present the product gave me something to work on. It’s really simple, the combination of querying amazon and preparing the query return to work along with galleria worked like a charm with a great display. Now, to end it, I added a simple search and a sidebar providing the product info which also uses jQuery effect.
I’d hope you liked the result and helped you to continue your projects using Zend_Service_Amazon. There are still things to cover like result pages, etc etc. There are certain limitations in galleria which only allows a max of 10 thumbs and for the javascript guru, there is also a mini problem which I couldn’t resolve due to my limited knowledge of javascript that is, enabling history and next image does not active product info.
Want to see the end of the result? Click here for the demo
