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

[y2ksw]

As long as the pages are attached to vbulletin, you can insert a placeholder at any place in the vBAdvanced templates or pages. Pages which aren't attached to vBulletin may or may not show banners, depending on how they are embedded.

Pages which are rendered by vBAdvanced should work, while IFRAME inclusions or pure HTML pages most probably won't work.

[j?rgk]

hello,


i use your mod on my side www.haustiere-forum.org at he moment the banner will show on the left side at the forumhome. i will have them in the middle-->which code i must enter in the forumhome template that the are show in the middle of the forum??


sorry for my bad english


the mod is great !

[Videx]

Subscribed. We need a simpler mod to do this. But where is this "Vbulletin Banners" product you mention?

edit: Oh heck, I installed it. Seems to be working. But we need some sort of noob instructions for people like me that don't know one template from another.

[Joe Siegler]

Is there any way to get the ad banners to have a target of _self or _top or something?

They're spawning in new windows, which I don't want them to do.

Or let me have them just display an image with NO link at all. I am not going to be using this for ad banners, but for forum header images. See here.

I would like it to not have a link at all, but failing that, I don't want it to open in a new window/tab, either. Any ideas?

[socalsoccer]

How can we have this listed on both selected forums and the forum home page? It seems like you can only have one or the other. If you select forum home page "yes" it will not appear on all of the selected pages.
thanks

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by j?rgk

hello,


i use your mod on my side www.haustiere-forum.org at he moment the banner will show on the left side at the forumhome. i will have them in the middle-->which code i must enter in the forumhome template that the are show in the middle of the forum??


sorry for my bad english


the mod is great !

There are so many places you may show a banner - just play with your phantasy and try ... maybe in the header template?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Videx

Subscribed. We need a simpler mod to do this. But where is this "Vbulletin Banners" product you mention?

edit: Oh heck, I installed it. Seems to be working. But we need some sort of noob instructions for people like me that don't know one template from another.

Teaching template modifications are beyond using of this plugin - if you would like to use any banner system you will have to know a little about templates too - unless you accept to show banners at fixed place, which I tried to avoid categorically

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Joe Siegler

Is there any way to get the ad banners to have a target of _self or _top or something?

They're spawning in new windows, which I don't want them to do.

Or let me have them just display an image with NO link at all. I am not going to be using this for ad banners, but for forum header images. See here.

I would like it to not have a link at all, but failing that, I don't want it to open in a new window/tab, either. Any ideas?

You can embed your banner in a HTML block (Text field). In this case it will do exactly what you want, e.g.

<img src="yourimage.gif" border="0" />

or

<a href="yoururl" target="_self"><img src="yourimage.gif" border="0" /></a>

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by socalsoccer

How can we have this listed on both selected forums and the forum home page? It seems like you can only have one or the other. If you select forum home page "yes" it will not appear on all of the selected pages.
thanks

If you don't have selected any forum, neither checked the forum home, it will show on all pages and forums.

If you want to show it on the forum home and on a few forums, you must create 2 records of the same banner, but different settings (one for forum home, the other for specific forums).

[Volvoholic]

Hi, Sounds like a nice mod.

I have been installing and uninstalling a few banner mods with varying level of success.

Before I install, can this mod handle shockwave .swf files?

Thanks in advance.
Volvoholic