Recently Bhooshan contacted me for help in translating his ideas for a re-design of his existing blog. One of the features he had in mind was the display of his Amazon Wishlist on his blog. Now, I understand that there are several plug-ins that let you do that, so I thought that this should be easy as pie. It turns out that it wasn’t.

I first installed one of the most popular plug-ins called AVH-Amazon. This is one of the most extensive plug-ins available for WordPress, so I figured that it ought to do the job. However, after installation I learned that due to a change in Amazon policy I would need to register at Amazon Web services and get a secret API key. The plug-in author didn’t provide one, as the key was going to be used by Amazon to monitor API usage and bill customers for use of those parts of its API that it charged a service fee for. Naturally the plug-in author didn’t want to risk it with his own API key, due to potential for misuse.

So faced with this roadblock and not wanting to go the extra mile and get an API key, I started looking for alternatives. I remembered that Amazon provided a RSS feed for a users Wishlist items. So I thought, what if I managed to extract the information from the feed itself ? As it is, I just wanted the item title, image and link to the item page, all of which were there in feed. Some tinkering in PHP and a few minutes later, I managed to parse the feed and show the items from the Wishlist. Voilà !! Instant Wishlist. 🙂

While I am happy with the result so far, I was wondering if there are any other good plug-ins that would let me do this a bit more efficiently. Any ideas ?