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

[voglermc]

I don't like this at the bottom of the ACP. Can it be moved higher?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by voglermc

I don't like this at the bottom of the ACP. Can it be moved higher?

You may change the includes/xml/cpnav_rbs.xml accordingly:

<navgroup phrase="rbs_rotating_banner_system" permissions="canadminmaintain" hr="true" displayorder="9999">

[voglermc]

Thanks for the quick response! This mod rocks!

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by voglermc

I don't like this at the bottom of the ACP. Can it be moved higher?

Originally Posted by y2ksw

You may change the includes/xml/cpnav_rbs.xml accordingly:

<navgroup phrase="rbs_rotating_banner_system" permissions="canadminmaintain" hr="true" displayorder="9999">

Cool.

Changing that line to:

<navgroup phrase="rbs_rotating_banner_system" permissions="canadminmaintain" hr="true" displayorder="19">

places it right under "Advertising" (vBulletin 4.03).

[voglermc]

I'm getting "Invalid File Specified" error when trying to overwrite a install

[voglermc]

It was the xml file I needed to ftp, fixed now. Thanks

[Globus]

Great! Thank you very much! Install and got it running in 60 minutes!
May i suggest possibility to develop code that will be allow to place banners on external sites!?

Thanx

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Globus

Great! Thank you very much! Install and got it running in 60 minutes!
May i suggest possibility to develop code that will be allow to place banners on external sites!?

Thanx

You may

I'm not sure if it is of great advantage to use the banner system on external sites, because of all of the overhead the forums generate. Basically it needs a dedicated script which accesses the forum database efficiently and extract the banner data. But even then, you would have to reproduce the plugin behaviour on the destination site, too.

Maybe it could be a standalone application, as it was in the very beginning, but it worked out to stay better inside the vbulletin shell, for a couple of reasons. Other software and sites would need completely different strategies, such as for example Joomla portals.

All I could positively think about, would be some way to comunicate banner settings across different vbulletin sites, because it could be reasonably easy to setup one site and propagate to all the others - provided they use the same logic. In this case however I see merely an add-on which allows to do this at regular intervals or at command.

[pitzerwm]

Y2, remember you created this code for me and I have it running on a number of "non-forum" sites.

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE);
define('SKIP_SESSIONCREATE', 1);
define('NOCOOKIES', 1);
define('THIS_SCRIPT', 'rbs_blank');
$phrasegroups = array();
$specialtemplates = array();
$globaltemplates = array();
$actiontemplates = array();
require_once('./global.php');
$html = '<html>
<head>
<title>Rotating Banner System</title>
</head>
<style type=\"text/css\">

<!--
body {
margin-left: 0px;
margin-top: 0px;
margin-right: 0px;
margin-bottom: 0px;
}
-->
</style>

<body>
<!--@vbbanners:0@-->
</body>
</html>';
eval('print_output("' . $html . '");');
?>

Calling it with:

<iframe src="http://98.131.36.111/rbs_html.php" width="600" height="80" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" ></iframe>

[y2ksw]

Oh I forgot about this