My first WordPress plugin, Now Watching, is now available in the WordPress Plugin repository.
The plugin allows you to display the movies you’re watching, have watched recently and plan to watch, with cover art fetched automatically from Amazon. It also links to the Amazon page for the movie DVD and can ear you referral fees from Amazon.
Now Watching is a fork of Ben Gunnink’s Now Reading Reloaded plugin modified to work with movies instead of books. It is forked from Ben’s code as of 5.1.1.0.
With it, you can manage a library of your current movies, as well as historical and planned movies.
Installation
- Upload ‘now-watching’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory
- Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
- Make any changes the to provided template files and store them in your theme directory (see the “Template Files” section)
- 1.1
- Made it compatible with WordPress 3.0 so that movie info can be edited now
- Fixed page titles when using permalinks
- Allowed UTF-8 characters in widget title
- 1.0
- First release forked from Now Reading Reloaded 5.1.1.0
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does my library page look funny?
Now Watching comes with premade templates (‘/templates/’) that were originally made for the default Kubrick theme that comes with WordPress. If your theme has more or less markup, the templates may look strange in your theme.
My suggestion to those who are having trouble is to open up the respect Now Watching template (such as ‘library.php’) side-by-side with one of your standard theme templates, and make sure that the markup matches.
Changelog
Template Files
The ‘templates’ folder of the Now Watching plugin contains a default set of templates for displaying your movie data in various places (sidebar, library, etc.). Any changes you make to these templates should be in your own theme folder. Now Watching will first look inside your active theme folder for a directory called ‘now-watching’ for template files; if it doesn’t find them, it will use its own. Customized template should be stored in ‘/wp-content/yourtheme/now-watching/’ so that your changes are not overwritten when you upgrade.
Hi,
i hope you can help me. I am not able to search with the plugin. When i click on the search button, nothing happens. I have insert the ASIN from the amazon page. What do i do wrong??
If your german, ich versteh auch deutsch 😉
@Tasmanian
Did you configure the plugin with your Amazon Web Services Access Key ID and Amazon Web Services Secret Access Key?
Are you having problems searching using the title only? Does the search work ok if you use the ASIN? What about searching with the director?
Is there a shortcode to put the details on a page, rather than in the sidebar?
@Sharon
Right now, there isn’t a shortcode. I can add it in the next update.
@Zack
Install “Page Links To” plugin and you can do just that. You can visit my blog to see it in action.
Zack, did you make any major changes to the code? I am not able to add books using Now Reading, yet yours works perfectly fine.
Hi. Great app, I find this really helpful. Any chance of a now listening to, now playing or now watching (tv) revision? Just an idea.
Thanks again!
@Alex Bello : I am also using the Page Links To plugin to create a page for my movies.
No, I haven’t made any major changes from the Now Reading Reloaded plugin yet.
@Rhys : Thanks. No plans right now for those plugins.
Where in the code is the line that controls the number of items displayed in the widget/sidebar? It appears to be 5 by default and I’d like to increase it on my site. Thanks!
@Mystech
Nevermind, found it. movies.php, line 83, $num = 5; In case anyone else requires the information. 🙂
Hi..I love Now Reading, and I’d love to use your plugin but I can only add movies and not edit them. I’ve reinstalled the plugin and tried everything. I even tried deleting the movies and it takes me to a blank screen. So to sum up…can load, not edit, not delete. Thanks Kris
@Kris
Kris, I need to update the plugin for WordPress 3.0. It should be out in a few days.
GREAT…can’t wait. Thanks so much!
@Kris
Updated. It’s now compatible with WordPress 3.0.
Hi, could you please take a look at my homepage, http://filmantrop.no. I have both Now reading and Now watching in my sidebar. However, when I click on a movie to enter its page, the sidebar doesn’t get loaded correctly. Neither does the featured content from the main page. If you click on a book from the Now reading plugin everything gets loaded correctly. What can I do about this?
Did you remove Now Watching?
I have the same problem with the sidebar loading directly below the entries in the main page, and not the sidebar.
I’m using the suffusion theme and notice that Now Reading installs separate templates for suffusion in its theme directory.
Would really love to see the same for Now Watching, but then I’m not the poor bugger doing all the work 🙂
Hi Zack,
Thanks for the plugin, it’s excellent work! I’m planning on integrating it into my own site soon.
I’ve got a quick question about how you handle page titles however. I notice that page titles work fine in Now Watching, but the Now Reading plugin running on the same site won’t pass book titles through to WordPress.
I’m trying to fix this issue in Now Reading and was wondering if you had any pointers on the changes you made to Now Watching that fixed the page title issue?
Looks like you were able to figure it out.
Get the error when adding :
Fatal error: Call to a member function children() on a non-object in /usr/www/users/colbra/sa/wp-content/plugins/now-watching/amazon.php on line 178
Got it sorted. Was using the wrong code.
Thanks.
Great!