Miscellaneous Hacks - Rotating Banner System

With the Rotating Banner System software, you may publish literally anywhere standard banners and advertising, with no restriction but your imagination. Unlike many other products, it allows to show an unlimited amount of banners and advertising, which are randomly shown at the places you choose, and you may refer generically to an Ad by using specific placeholders.

Also the management is straight-forward and simple to use. Forum administrators with maintenance rights may add, edit and delete records from the Administration Control Panel (ACP), one of each representing a banner. After saving the new banner settings, they are immediately visible at your board.

Compatibility: from vBulletin 3.6.5 onwards

By the way, I do also install the hack on your boards, but since I am very, very busy, it may take some time (weeks) until it gets done.


Tutorials:

• How-to create my first banner (Flash).

Updates:

• 2.0.1: Simple click tracker added, HTML help included.
• 2.0.3: Small bug fixes; additional banner list, navigation bar, E-Mail field for banner event notifications and automatic save on scroll setting; absolute URL to rbs_banner.php in order to allow click tracking on non-standard pages; supported languages: English, Italian; Help file clean-up.
• 2.0.5: Small bug fixes; additional details in banner list; email notification for epired banners.
• 2.0.6: vbCMS compatibility bug fix; additional banner lists.
• 2.0.7: Usergroups filter: now it is possible to define a list of usergroups which may show a banner; additional vbCMS compatibility bug fix.
• 2.0.8: Various fixes and most of all, inclusion of the right files: admin_rbs.php, cpnav_rbs.xml
• 2.0.9: Extra comma fix in new record creation.
• 2.1.0: Fix for an occasional banner type selection bug, when the sample banners have been deleted or disabled.
• 2.2.0 (Major upgrade): Up to 10 different banner locations. Requires changes to your existing placeholders in your templates, since a more generic format has been chosen. If you don't need more than 2 different locations, you don't need to upgrade. Changed files: rbs_banner.php, admin_rbs.php
• 2.2.1: Minor bug fix in files: admin_rbs_h_banner_list.php, admin_rbs_v_banner_list.php
• 2.2.1: Hotfix for Max Clicks saving bug.
• 2.2.2: More listings and less files. PDF Help. Separate Italian add-ons and help. Duplicate button.
• 2.2.3: Minor bug fixes. Changed files: product-rbs.xml
• 2.2.4: Flash Banner support (beta). Changed files: product-rbs.xml, rbs_wrapper.swf, admin_rbs.php, English Help.
• 2.2.5: Hotfix for vBulletin 4.0.2 compatibility bug.
• 2.2.6: Checking for installed Flash Wrapper rbs_wrapper.swf; A few English FAQ; Help files. Changed files: product-rbs.xml
• 2.3.0 (Major upgrade): New modules: Delete Expired Banners, Disable Expired Banners; Detail Banner Statistics with unique access key for your customers; Updated help; Changed files: all.
• 2.3.1: Hotfix for missing field in rbs_hist table. Changed files: none, just update product.
• 2.3.2: Added: Unsupported option for setting any number of available positions between 1 and big bang. Fixed: Small bug and speed issues. Removed: Italian translation. Italians may now request support at www.vbulletin.it. Changed files: admin_rbs.php.
• 2.3.3: Fix: Copy selected forum ID's during banner duplication. Changed: start and end hours for new banners are set to 0:00 and 23:59 respectively. Changed files: admin_rbs.php.
• 2.3.4: Option: Send Mail Before. This option allows to schedule expiring banners differently. New variables for emails: $rbs_enddate: This variable holds the formatted banner ending date and time based on the standard formats for date and time in vBulletin settings; $rbs_name: This variable holds the banner name. EMail Notifications option description: Added direct links to the email phrases for quick changes. Changed files: rbs_mail_cron.php.
• 2.4.0 (Major upgrade): Removed: Option to enable or disable mailing. Banners with email addresses to notify are handled. Setting to reset mailing in single banners. Now, if mailing should be repeated, you will have to edit the banner from phpMyAdmin. Added: Order links in lists. The initial state is ordered by ID, as before. By clicking the titles, the other voices can be ordered. Clicking twice inverts the order. This works in all lists. Options to prevent counting and reducing thus a tiny bit of load. A new bunch of demo banners for new installations. Demo banners are locked into database in order to avoid 30% of the questions because of the 'experts' deleting them before trying the product. They can be disabled and modified though. The true experts can delete them after all testing from the database by using phpMyAdmin without side effects. Changes: Phrase for emailing about expiring banners, now also with direct links to the phrases. Demo banners. Our old publisher ID is replaced with the new ones, and old demo banners are updated with the new ones, if found. The functions have been exported to includes/functions_rbs.php. This makes the product code smaller and easier to maintain, and runs faster on sites where caching/acceleration is enabled. Changed Files: all *.php
• 2.4.1: Option Likelihood. This new option adds a weight to banners and allows thus to show one banner more often than another. The default weight is 100%. We also make sure that the final date of the default banners falls into a valid range. Changed files: includes/functions_rbs.php and rbs_stats.php.
• 2.4.2: Workaround for update sequence problems.

Hacks and unsupported add-ons:

• Banner Rotator Widget To CMS
• Rotate banners in-place
• Italian Translation

[djbaxter]

I've had this add-on working beautifully from vBulletin 3.x right through to 4.12.

Hwever, I've just added my first Flash banner.

The placeholder for where I've entered the information for the Flash ad is in a centered div. For all of the static banners, this works perfectly.

But the Flash banner, although it displays fine, is left-aligned instead of centered.

Any idea? Is this something to do with the Flash wrapper?

===============

Updated: Apologies. This was my error.

I had a placeholder inserted in the ad template for this position prior to the addition of the "Advertising" feature in the Admin CP. When I updated to use the vBulletin Advertising locations, the older placeholder (which was not centered) got left behind in the original template. Removing the redundant placeholder fixed the problem.

Interestingly, when using regular image banners, this was not a problem. It was only when I tried to use the Flash wrapper that the olde redundant placeholder took precedence over the newer ACP Advertising positions.

[irrimiri]

I must be a dummy, but I don't often work in the admin.
Is there anyone who can simply point me into the right direction?
I can't see any banners on the online forum. Neither the banners that were installed with this mod.

All seems to work fine inside of the admin. But apparantly there is something I miss that I don't see in the installation instructions.
I cant' get the banners to show up.

Next to that I see one of the images you provide with the mod. But I can't find this page and have the feeling it's essential. Where do I look in the templates for this page? I am kinda lost here. *^^* I can't find the template.


Kind Regards,

M.

[oddmud]

It says right in the top of the picture "ad_navbar_below" so, use your "search in templates" option in the AdminCP, and search for that. Enter in the information, and there ya go.

[boodog]

Working great, thank you. Can you tell us how to edit the email sent in the banner event notifications?

[gpigate]

can someone point me in the right direction? we just upgraded from 3.6 vb to 4.x vb and now I can not get the ads to work. I am sure it is because the code is now missing from the template, but when I add it back in they still do not show up.

do I need to upgrade my rbs to the latest version? if I do this, will I lose the banners I currently have in there?

...update I went ahead and upgraded to 2.3.1 and still can not get it to turn on. I have tried using the ad manager in vb, i have edited the ad_navbar_below template etc. nothing is working

Thanks in advance

[gpigate]

got it fixed... thanks

[cruiserheads]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

If you use common templates to all pages, there you go. Such as ad_below_navbar. In all other cases, add a placeholder to the specific template at your wish.

could you please help me a litter bit more on this What i sould acctualy need to do

Sorry

[munkeyboi]

Great mod.
Working fine on 4.1.1 with a few tweaks.

Would suggest one thing.

A preview mode/button please

Thanks for the mod

[nhawk]

OK, I'm stumped. One of the flash banners I run is directly below the Notifications dropdown for PMs.

In order to allow the dropdown to go over the flash banner I modified the code and added wmode="transparent" as shown below...

$embed = '<embed src="' . $bburl . '/bas_wrapper.swf" FlashVars="banner=' . $image . '&jlink=' . $url . iif($rs['width'], '&bwidth=' . $rs['width']) . iif($rs['height'], '&bheight=' . $rs['height']) . '" wmode="transparent" loop="false" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/get/flashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" ' . iif($rs['width'], ' width="' . $rs['width'] . '"') . iif($rs['height'], ' height="' . $rs['height'] . '"') . '></embed>';

That works very well with one problem. When I click on the flash banner to be taken to the link for it, many times I get 2 windows that open. One with the proper link and one with the banner by itself.

Any ideas how to fix this?

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by nhawk

OK, I'm stumped. One of the flash banners I run is directly below the Notifications dropdown for PMs.

In order to allow the dropdown to go over the flash banner I modified the code and added wmode="transparent" as shown below...

$embed = '<embed src="' . $bburl . '/bas_wrapper.swf" FlashVars="banner=' . $image . '&jlink=' . $url . iif($rs['width'], '&bwidth=' . $rs['width']) . iif($rs['height'], '&bheight=' . $rs['height']) . '" wmode="transparent" loop="false" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/get/flashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" ' . iif($rs['width'], ' width="' . $rs['width'] . '"') . iif($rs['height'], ' height="' . $rs['height'] . '"') . '></embed>';

That works very well with one problem. When I click on the flash banner to be taken to the link for it, many times I get 2 windows that open. One with the proper link and one with the banner by itself.

Any ideas how to fix this?

I just finally got flash banners working on my forum but I was not able to use the embed ot object code. The only way it worked for me was to put the target link and the link to the flash banner in the two text fields:

URL
If you are using an Image banner, please insert here the destination URL.

Image / Flash
If you define here a picture, it is shown together with the Name as a tooltip, and the URL as destination. For Flash banners, please insert here the swf file.

and then set all three check boxes below that to "Yes":

Flash Banner = Yes
Please enable this option, if this banner is a flash (SWF) banner and you desire to use the inbuilt banner wrapper. Together with the wrapper you may also enable click tracking and other related features.

Flash Banner: object Tag = Yes
Please enable this option, if this banner is a flash (SWF) banner and you wish to use the object tag. It may be used alone or together with the embed tag. Please note that some browsers may require this tag in order to show a flash banner.

Flash Banner: embed Tag = Yes
Please enable this option, if this banner is a flash (SWF) banner and you wish to use the embed tag. It may be used alone or together with the object tag. Please note that some browsers may require this tag in order to show a flash banner.