.Products

When you go to the settings page in the admin backend, are there any issues being reported or are you getting the success message?

Hi Chris,

we get this message " Congratulations!No errors were encountered when attmempting(their typo not mine) to connect with Amazon, your store should be ready to go."

Hello? Has anyone got any ideas?

what keywords are you using?

WE have about 5 keywords in the parameter. One of them is "natural" and amazon is returning 798,998 results. Unfortunately, none of those results are showing up on the frontend. I have tried as many as 15 keywords at once with a total of over 3 million results and not one of them will post to the front.

If you look at the first attached image it shows the cart and the related module are installed and waiting for products. If you look at the second attached image you see everything should be ready to go...

Hopefully we can get this worked out, because I am just about ready to request a refund and set up an AStore.

Unfortunately, Amazon's API that we're using doesn't operate the same way as the Amazon website when it comes to keywords. Via the API, Amazon will only return products that contain everything listed as keywords. In fact, "keywords" is a bit of a misnomer since it doesn't actually treat them as disparate entities, but instead as a phrase.

However, I did recently fix an issue with using multiple keywords for another customer having similar issues. The fix should make it far more likely for results to show up when using multiple keywords. I will hopefully have this patch out very shortly, but in the meantime I can send you the fix as-is from my development branch. If you have an email you'd like me to send it to, just post it here and I'll send it over this weekend.

I have tried many combinations of keywords to get this working. A few examples are using one keyword with no comma no spaces; using multiple keywords with commas but no spaces, then with spaces and no commas; then with %20 between them. None of that had any effect.

Marcello and I obviously have the same conflict. I installed a new slide show module recently and as it turned out my super-fish menus were conflicting. The developer of the extension was very quick in providing a solution and created an update to compensate for the issue. Do you think turning off various plugins might help at all. Its just a thought.

Hi Chris,

Unfortunately, I am not a developer which is why I am trying to use your product. I am hoping for an update on this extension. If you have a fix, are you planning to apply it to an updated release of the extension? If so I would like to try it otherwise I am left with only the refund as an option.

Thanks

Yes, the fix I was referring to will be applied to the next release, but there are other features I'm working on before that gets officially released. However, it's very simple for me to package up what I have working currently and send it to you.

Hello again,

I uninstalled the original component and installed the updated package you sent over. Unfortunately their was no improvement. I was getting a little creative and decided to try few things. I thought perhaps one of my url rewrites might have been causing the issue so I turned off the Apache rewrites and removed the rewrite file on the server. No luck. I also tried variations of keywords and matched the page name to the menu item. No luck. You mentioned the system clock in another post but I am not clear how to do that. I was under the impression servers ran off the same international standard. Can you provide guidance on that procedure?

Well, it looks like I am running out of time on my 30 days and can't really get the support I need to make this work. It really is a bummer because I had high hopes for this extension.

I found this in another post "nature of CSS, certain themes can sometimes override the styles that we've used. I will look into attempting to prevent this sort of thing, but you might want to take a look at your own CSS in the meantime."

Could you have a look and tell me if this could be the issue [[http://www.ecoevaluator.com/testing-products.html]]

Todd have you tried setting your theme to default joomla and then disabling any modules or plugins as a sort of process of elimination to find what may be causing the conflict?

Also try testing without SEF urls

Here you will see that something is definitely not right...Either conflict or the server time.

http://www.ecoevaluator.com/index.php?option=com_moolaamazonedition&view=item&asin=B0036EH186

when compared to

http://www.ajento.com/niche/001/index.php?option=com_moolaamazonedition&view=item&asin=B0036EH186

and even here on Marcello's page

http://www.roero-illuminazione.it/index.php?option=com_moolaamazonedition&view=item&asin=B0036EH186

and here on the demo site

http://moolademo.cybersprocket.com/index.php?option=com_moolaamazonedition&view=item&asin=B0036EH186

Todd, if you do not have direct access to your server you can try creating a test Article in Joomla. After you apply the article will have a create date and time located in the "Parameters (Article)", with respect to your time zone settings in your global configuration.

Amazon Web Services is very particular about the time of the request. They have a short window from the request timestamp v. the real time on their server. If the time on your server is too far out of sync then they will reject your API call and you will get no results. We ran into this with a server that was off after the time change. I am not sure why they do this, probably to prevent cache spoofing on their prices. Regardless, make sure your server is set to the right time zone & is reflecting the current time from within your PHP environment.

Remember there are several time settings that can have an effect. The time on the server, the timezone of the PHP environment, and the timezone of the runtime PHP application (Joomla! in this case). If any of those are off by more than a few minutes you could have problems with Amazon API requests. That is not something we can easily code around in our plugin, nor should we, IMO. At best our plugin should honor the time settings sent to use from Joomla! and not allow it to be overridden.

That may not be the issue you are having, but it is something to check if you are having product results not coming back from a request you know to otherwise be valid.

Hello,

Josh, Thanks for the suggestions, I went through all of them and here is what happened. I activated the default template in Joomla and I had the same issue (Moola isssue 4). I tried the SEF idea and that also had no effect (Moola issue 5). I am unaware of any one place that I have control over the server time, but will speak to my host tomorrow. I will also work through all of my extensions and modules and get back to you.

Did you try creating a test article and checking it's timestamp?

Another suggestion would be to install the amazon catalog module, whether it works or not will tell us a lot. It's not as nice as this component but does utilize the API.
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/ads-a-affiliates/amazon/11793?qh=YTo0OntpOjA7czo2OiJhbWF6b24iO2k6MTtzOjc6ImFtYXpvbmUiO2k6MjtzOjg6ImFtYXpvbidzIjtpOjM7czo3OiJhbWF6b25zIjt9

Good morning,

I setup a test article today to determine the system time. It was off by one hour. For some reason it did not adjust for daylight savings time.Which is a bit strange so I adjusted the server setting in global configuration to reflect mountain time. This is the only control of the system clock that I am aware of. I also turned off the caching on the server. So with that all set I updated the test article and found the system clock to be on time with the Windows system clock on my computer. Still no products :(

I will forge ahead on my quest and try the catalog extension just for giggles.

Hi there,

So here is the latest update in my quest for MOOLA.I have installed the module you suggested and have placed it on this page http://www.ecoevaluator.com/secret-laboratory.html I even went as far as making an additional user account with new keys. Here is what we got(Moola issue 6). As you can see we seem to have a similar issue however without any CSS issues.

I also disabled all modules for a bit to rule out conflicts. I then enabled the Amazon catalog and the Moola modules but still no luck. Hopefully we are chipping away at the issue. It seems we have narrowed the possibilities considerably. Any thoughts remaining?

ok so we see from here
http://www.ecoevaluator.com/secret-laboratory.html?l=1&n=195208011&c=18#amazoncatalog
that nothing is being pulled from Amazon. Your server time seems to be correct as mine also shows an hour off from the recent daylight savings time. Is it showing the correct year? I'm sure it is, but just to be sure.

What version of PHP is running on your server?

That's a big affirmative on the mysql Ghost Rider! I guess I've had a bit too much caffeine today..... The system date is correct.

lol didn't mean to type mysql. I sent you an email

Our component generates the timestamp from PHP's date() function using the ISO 8601 standard. This standard is designed to take into account timezones (and daylight savings) by using an offset as the last component of the value. What this means is that being in a different time zone shouldn't matter since the server will be aware of the time zone that it is in and send this information along with its current time. What is far more likely is that the server's clock itself is out of sync by a few minutes or so. This is just like having a clock that runs a little slow or fast, after a while the time is not accurate and it needs to be updated. Most modern computers automatically update their clocks using various servers around the world, however, some servers never have this set up and their clocks get more and more out of sync over time.

Of course, most people can't just get into their server and update the system clock to fix this. The only method I can think of to handle something like this is to have the plugin itself use a third-party system or server to get an accurate timestamp (of course, this system has it's own issues, such as latency).

The best solution is to just fix the time on the server, but this isn't always going to be viable for everyone. I'll look into having the component itself attempt to validate the system's clock.