Our Amazon Shopping Cart extension for Joomla! includes a handy plugin that allows you to use an editor button to search the Amazon database directly from the Joomla! article editor. It also works with K2 articles, and any other extension that supports editor button plugins. This article explains how to use it.

To use this feature you must first make sure that the AWS Product plugin is enabled, which you do using the Joomla! plugin manager. That is all that you need to do.

Once you have enabled the plugin, if you open up the Joomla! article editor, you should see a button called "Amazon Product" at the bottom of the page. Click the thumbnail below to see a screenshot.

 When you click the Amazon Product button, this brings up a modal window, which contains a form that allows you to search the Amazon product database. Click the thumbnail below to see an example.

To run a search, simply enter some keywords and click the "View search results" button. This will show a list of up to ten results (see screenshot below).

To insert one or more of the products into your articles, click the select box labelled "insert product" next to the product(s) that you want to insert. Then click the button labelled "insert selected products". If you wish to insert the entire search list, you can click the button labelled "use this search".  When you have done this, the modal window will close, and some short code will be inserted into your article (see the image below).

 Note that you can position the code as you want, and put text above and below it.

When you view the article on your site, you will see the Amazon product displayed in all its glory, as in the example below.

It's as easy as that.

Additional Information

 The only information that you have to supply in order search the product database is one or two keywords. It is best not to supply more than two, because Amazon will only return results that match all keywords supplied. You can also restrict the results by price, and by Amazon search index. You can see search results beyond the first ten by selecting a results page beyond the first. If you leave the search index at "All", Amazon will return up to 5 pages of results. For any other search index, it will return up to 10 pages. However note that not all search indices are supported in all countries, so sometimes you may get no results.

 In order to see the Amazon products displayed in the front end of your site, the component displaying your article must support content plugins. This includes the core Joomla content component of course, also K2 and most other components. It includes Virtuemart, but you must remember to enable content plugins in the Virtuemart configuration.

Also you must remember to enable the AmazonWS content plugin.