[ErnestA]

Track Banner Usage!

I've read a few posts from people with the same issue that I have. This product would be perfect if you could track which banners are displayed and how often. If you're charging for advertising, this is almost a requirement.
Well, being a programmer myself, I decided to figure out a very simple way to track it. Now, you'll have to query the database manually yourself to get the statistics, if I get adventurous down the road I might add that. But for now, at least the database will track the banners that get displayed and when.

This information is provided AS IS with no warranty or liability at all. Use it at your own risk!

First of all, open a connection to your database (I assume Mysql). Use the following create table statement. If you don't have command line access, you may want to try integrating this create table statement with the product.xml file.

We're going to create a new table to track banners. So issue the following command at the Mysql command prompt:
CREATE TABLE brotatorlog (bid smallint(20) unsigned, name varchar(255), bannerdate TIMESTAMP);

Next, go into the admincp of vbulletin, go to "Plugins & Products" and click on "Plugin Manager"
Click on the link to edit banner rotator. In the plugin PHP code window, scroll all the way to the bottom of the window.

The last statement in this window should be:
$defaultdir . "/" . $ban['name'] . "' alt='" . $ban['alt'] . "' width='".$ban['width']."' height='".$ban['height']."' border='0'>";
}

Don't delete or modify any of the existing code. Insert the following code AFTER the above line.


if (!$ban['bid']) {
}
else
{
$db->query("INSERT INTO brotatorlog (bid, name) VALUES (".$ban['bid'].",'".$ban['name']."')");
}



Display a few banners then go into your mysql database and issue the following query:

select * from brotatorlog;

You should see something like this (excuse the poor formatting):

+------+-----------------------+---------------------+
| bid | name | bannerdate |
+------+-----------------------+---------------------+
| 1 | mybannera.jpg | 2009-01-08 18:14:32 |
| 2 | mybanner1.gif | 2009-01-08 18:16:37 |
+------+-----------------------+---------------------+

using the bid field, you can cross reference it back to the original brotator table with an SQL join query. Remember to periodically purge that table.

Enjoy.

Ernest.