Miscellaneous Hacks - Kindle Daily Deal Grabber by BOP5 (VB3)

Brought to you by BirdOPrey5 / Qapla.com

Version 2.1.4

Compatible with VB 3.7.x, VB 3.8.x, and VB 4.x.x.

Now compatible with Amazon.com, Amazon.uk and Amazon.de!

Every day Amazon.com has "daily deal" on one or more Amazon Kindle ebooks. This deal will usually reduce the price of an ebook to only $0.99 to $1.99, which is a signficant savings off the regular price.

Recently they started including a daily deal for kids or teens as well.

Amazon allows you to sign up for an email notice of the deal but they are notoriously unreliable. Amazon does NOT offer an official RSS feed of the daily deal either.

This mod will grab the info of each daily deal straight from Amazon and post it to your forum as either a new thread or a new post in an existing thread.

VB4 Demo: Kindle Daily Deal at Qapla.com Forum
VB3 Demo: Kindle Daily Deal at Joe's Ultimate Off Topic

You can completely customize how the post will read using an easy replacement system above.

This mod relies on Amazon providing consistent pages and data. In my testing it works the vast majority of the time. However there is no guarantee it will work all the time on every daily deal. I have done my best to always at least provide a link to the deal even if other info is unavailable but I can't guarantee it will always work.

This mod relies on a scheduled task to run daily. Amazon usually posts the deal by 12 AM Pacific Time. You may need to go to Admin CP -> Scheduled Tasks -> Scheduled Tasks Manager to set a more appropriate time for this task to run on your forum. (Sometimes they are late in posting the deal though so I suggest waiting until at least 2AM Pacific Time to run it. )


Affiliate ID: This mod provides the site Admin the option for providing their own Amazon affiliate ID. If no affiliate ID is provided, my affiliate ID will be used.

If you have viglinks or skimlinks installed on your forum be sure you have the option to overwrite amazon affiliate ids turned on- both companies offer this option.

If upgrading from a 1.x version it is strongly recommended you uninstall the old version first. If you do not you will need to manually edit the Post Content settings to the new value.

Please Mark as Installed if you use this.
Donations always appreciated.

[BirdOPrey5]

Reserved.

[v123shine]

I love u BOP5

This is great addon.

[BirdOPrey5]

Updated to 1.03 to deal with when they (Amazon) use HTML tags inside multi-deal titles like they did today.

Like with the last update if you're not concerned about the version number all you need to do is upload the new php file in the /includes/cron/ directory.

However you can follow the full upgrade instructions to have your installed version number updated as well.

[BirdOPrey5]

Updated to Version 1.04
-Fixed the problem that showed up today with Amazon using a different image URL for today's deal.
-Pushed the default time back of the cron job about 2 hours. Amazon has been late posting the deal lately causing empty data to be collected.

It is recommended you run the full upgrade procedure.
(Upload an overwrite the php file AND import and overwrite = Yes the product xml file.)

[BirdOPrey5]

Updated to 1.06

Fixes a few changes over the weeks.

[BirdOPrey5]

Upgraded to version 2.0. Added support for daily kids/teen deals and affiliate ids. Suggest uninstalling old versions before upgrading to this one.

[BirdOPrey5]

Updated to Version 2.1.0.

Added support for Amazon.uk and Amazon.de in addition to Amazon.com.

Notes:

When using one of the international sites it is suggested you edit the "Post Template" setting in the mod settings.

The UK version does not have kids/teens deals, but they do have 2 (or more) daily deals. Only the first 2 are supported.

For the UK I suggest using this post template:

[B][SIZE=3]Kindle Daily Deal for {DATE}[/SIZE][/B]

[B][I][URL="{LINK}"]{TITLE}[/URL][/I][/B]

[URL="{LINK}"][img]https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/[/img][/URL]

[B]About:[/B] {SHORTDESC}

[B]Deal Price: {DEALPRICE}[/B] (Today Only) ({DISCOUNT} Off)

[B][SIZE=3]Deal # 2[/SIZE][/B]

[B][I][URL="{LINK}"]{ALT_TITLE}[/URL][/I][/B]

[URL="{LINK}"][img]https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/[/img][/URL]

[B]About:[/B] {ALT_SHORTDESC}

[B]Deal Price: {ALT_DEALPRICE}[/B] (Today Only) ({ALT_DISCOUNT} Off)


[B][URL="{LINK}"]View All Deals Now[/URL][/B] or [URL="{ALINK}"]Browse Amazon.uk[/URL].

The German site does only 1 daily deal, there is usually not a second deal so for that site I suggest using this post template (Better German translations would be appreciated- I translated with Google):

[B][SIZE=3]Kindle-Deal des Tages: {DATE}[/SIZE][/B]

[B][I][URL="{LINK}"]{TITLE}[/URL][/I][/B]

[URL="{LINK}"][img]https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/[/img][/URL]

[B]Umschreibung:[/B] {SHORTDESC}

[B]Heutigen Preis: {DEALPRICE}[/B] (Nur Heute) ({DISCOUNT} reduziert)

[B][URL="{LINK}"]Jetzt Ansehen[/URL][/B] or [URL="{ALINK}"]Bl?ttern Amazon.de[/URL].

[BirdOPrey5]

Updated to version 2.1.2 due to changes in Amazon USA daily deal formatting. Amazon also removed the titles of the deal books from the page.

The title will now show something like "Romance Daily Deal" or "Teens Daily Deal", etc...

If updating (USA ONLY) please change the post template setting to:

[B][SIZE=3]Kindle Daily Deal for {DATE}[/SIZE][/B]

[B][I][URL="{LINK}"]{TITLE}[/URL][/I][/B]

[URL="{LINK}"][img]https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/[/img][/URL]

[B]About:[/B] {SHORTDESC}

[B]Deal Price: {DEALPRICE}[/B] (Today Only) ({DISCOUNT} Off)

[B][SIZE=3]Other Deal[/SIZE][/B]

[B][I][URL="{LINK}"]{ALT_TITLE}[/URL][/I][/B]

[URL="{LINK}"][img]https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/[/img][/URL]

[B]About:[/B] {ALT_SHORTDESC}

[B]Deal Price: {ALT_DEALPRICE}[/B] (Today Only) ({ALT_DISCOUNT} Off)


[B][URL="{LINK}"]View More Deals Now[/URL][/B] or [URL="{ALINK}"]Browse Amazon.com[/URL].

UK and German Amazon users do not need to upgrade.

[klaush]

Nice and thanks! Can someone test the German link settings with this addon? It says: link not found.

Thanks!