For those of you who have been using EasyAzon for years to sell Amazon affiliate products on all your WordPress blogs you probably have noticed that upgrading to EasyAzon 3 broke all of your older shortcode for EasyAzon 2.1 and older. This is because the older shortcode uses [easazon-link-link] or [easyazon-block] instead of the newer code using underscore instead [easyazon_block] and [easyazon_image] without the link.
Well you don’t have to pull your hair out in frustration, there is a quick WordPress plugin called Search and Replace that will let you go through and make the short code changes automatically in your WordPress database for you.
Just download search and replace from WordPress.org or find it with Add New Plugins
After you install it and activate it, you click on Tools –> Search and Replace
Search for easyazon-block first and then click on the "field" dial for All – search/replace! and put easyazon_block as the field you are replacing that finding with.
Click go and you will see the results of the search and replace, you can see on one of my blogs I instantly found and fixed 238 posts that used the older invalid EasyAzon shortcode in less than 60 seconds, imagine if I had to manually update 238 posts to fix the code.
Now to fix the image part you go back to search and replace and put in the easyazon-image-link in the search section, and easyazon_image in the replace section.
Voila, you just replaced all of your EasyAzon 2.x broken shortcode with compatible EasyAzon 3.x shortcode with this easy trick.
Search and Replace gives you many more options as well for purging old plugin shortcode, if you retired any plugin that uses shortcode you can use this plugin to help replace it with new shortcode or simply remove it altogether, but be careful as this plugin does find and replace content in your database, there is always risk for harm. I would make sure you backup your WordPress database prior to making any changes just in case.
EasyAzon is still my favorite plugin for earning Amazon Affiliate income for WordPress blogs, but it was a shame they changed the structure of the short code in the newest version which made the old code incompatible, there were sites I had with hundreds and hundreds of posts that needed code changes as a result.
PS, I sell a lite version of EasyAzon if you are interested for only $3 which allows you to earn from images, it is a great way to test the lite version of the product before you choose to buy the full version.
Buy AzonPostImages for $3 and start inserting images into your WordPress posts to earn Amazon Affiliate Income.
Then if you really like it, upgrade to EasyAzon 3 and you can get full summary shortcode, localization, link cloaking, nofollow and so much more.
This is an original article from WP Cypher Copyright 2012
