I am curious to know if there are any chances of a backport. If not, would it be a question of technical issues preventing such a backport or lack of time?

Comments

MGParisi’s picture

I am interested too!

Doesnt seem to be any good amazon type projects for 5 that are maintained. If anyone knows a stable one, I would love it...

How much work would it be to backport it? What would I have to do if I wanted to do this myself?

eaton’s picture

Status: Active » Postponed

Backporting the project to Drupal 5 would be somewhat time consuming, primarily due to the reliance on SchemaAPI and the drupal_write_record() convenience function. In addition, if you're hoping to run it under PHP4, all of the XML handling code would need to be rewritten to eliminate the dependency on the SimpleXML functions PHP5 offers. In the Amazon Tools module, that code alone consumed ~80K or so.

Finally, the theming mechanisms for the module rely pretty heavily on Drupal 6's templating system. It'd be possible to migrate things or handle them differently, but it would definitely be a nontrivial amount of work.

If someone is willing to put the time into handling the backport, I would probably be willing to commit it and roll a Drupal 5 release, but the majority of my energy is focused on D6 work; critical bugs for D5 modules get my attention but moving new code backwards is a lower priority.

Hope that information helps!

venkat-rk’s picture

Thank you for this update. The PHP version is a non-issue for me, but I am not at a point where the backport is that critical yet. I may revisit this later, though.

smoothify’s picture

I need an amazon module for a Drupal 5 site, so i've been playing around trying to get this to work in 5.

Using the schema module (http://drupal.org/project/schema) is a great help, it helps backport most of the schema related functions to drupal 5 allowing much of the module to remain unchanged. There was a few functions missing but after adding them to schemas utility inc file, I actually got all the amazon modules to install (amazon, media, search and asin). After a bit of further tweaking it seems to work ok and retrieves and stores amazon items correctly, though I haven't started looking at the theme functions yet.

So Its definitely possible, to do, i'm just not sure on the best way to approach the extra functions required - whether they should get added to schema module or just included in an amazon inc file.

MGParisi’s picture

I would work on the http://drupal.org/node/289780#comment-948362 version. It seems allot of people have interest in this.

eaton’s picture

I would work on the http://drupal.org/node/289780#comment-948362 version. It seems allot of people have interest in this.

Just a point of clarification: that's a separate project with a different set of core features. It IS, however, already working well under Drupal 5. :-)

greenbean’s picture

Its funny, people in this thread say they are against a back port. And people in the other project don't want to improve it because it will break the ability to be upgraded to this project. Its an impossible situation.

eaton’s picture

Its funny, people in this thread say they are against a back port. And people in the other project don't want to improve it because it will break the ability to be upgraded to this project. Its an impossible situation.

Just for reference, the nature of the data storage for both AAT and this module means there isn't much risk of real compatibility issues. The amazon data itself is stored in different ways between the two projects, but that's re-imported every 24 hours or so anyways, to keep prices and such fresh.

I'm not against a backport, I just wanted to be clear about how much time I would have to dedicate to maintaining a D5 branch and what areas of difficulty there would be in such a project.

MGParisi’s picture

Are you saying there is no upgrade path from the other module?

eaton’s picture

Are you saying there is no upgrade path from the other module?

There is an upgrade path in progress that would convert 'amazon' nodes and 'amazon_item' nodes to use the new backend functions specified by the Amazon module, rather than the ones provided in Amazon Tools. That code is not yet complete, however.

After that portion has been completed, the next step is a conversion path from the old 'ASIN' CCK field for Drupal 5 to the new ASIN field provided in the Amazon module.

The intent of my earlier message was to clarify that Amazon module's DB schema is pretty unaffected by Amazon Associate Tools'. If, for example, you decide not to store several fields like image size or publisher name, it won't affect the upgrade path. This module will simply be pulling in the ASIN product IDs that AAT stores, saving them to the Amazon module's schema, and re-importing the full product data from Amazon.

rfay’s picture

Status: Postponed » Closed (won't fix)

There will be no backport. Too many other issues await us.