Geek Advertising Banner system RC1

HowdA All.

From the makers of Hydrogen comes the latest mack - GAB (Geek Advertising Banners).

This has come about by needing an advertising system that no other hack seemed to totally fulfill. Personally - I really didnt want to burden myself with supporting another hack - but I felt it was significantly better than other hack systems out there so I thought many would be able to benefit from it.

Whats so freaking cool about it?

1- use flash, normal, text based (google adsense) or rotating banners
2- Decide which scripts run the banners
3- Define which forums run the banners
4- define which usergroups can turn off the banners
5- Make ads stop at x amount of hits
6- Make ads stop at x amount of views
7- Make ads start/stop at certain times
8- track views and/or hits
9- Wipes your bum

Why am I releasing this now? It seems to be hip and trendy to release Banner hacks. In all reality - this has been a very long work in progress that is finally rounding the finsihing stages. The current RC pacakge is considered complete except for the show stats segment (its recording stats, but you cant browse them easily yet).

LIke with any hack (especially a Beta) back up you DB and files needing change (global.php,admincp/index.php).

Known issues:

• Flash ads can not appear on same page as a rotating banner ad.
• After installing for the first time, you will most likely need to edit a phrase (any phrase) and click save to rebuild phrases
• Flash banners hide drop down menus!!! Be careful where you put them or dont use them!

Basic install instructions:

• Upload all files to relevant locations
• chmod the gab and gish folders to 777 (or change the owner of the folders to whatever account your PHP process runs under).
• Run the gab_install.php file in your admincp folder.
• Follow the steps.
• On the file changes - pay close attention to see if certain changes couldnt be made. If any changes could not be made, you need to manually make those changes.
• When complete, move changed files from gish/gab/rc1.0 to their respective locations
• Ad a new cron job to run daily (file: GAB_cron_daily.php)
• Edit each gab category to include the forums you want the ads to appear in.
• Ad $GAB_ads[x] to your templates where ever you want ads to appear (x represents the ad number depending on how many ads are set to run on that script. $GAB_ads[0] is the first ad block, $GAB_ads[1] would be the second, etc...)
• Read The Freaking README!!!!!!!

Quick Upgrade instructions

For users of GAB Beta 2, uninstall it and then install this version. In all reality, you could just revert the file changes and delete the GAB_ tables from yur DB (heck, you dont even need to do that).

To upgrade from RC1.5 to RC1.6, just replace existing files with the latest from the downloaded package and run the template portion of the installer (you can skip the rest of the install steps). You may have to revert your GUSH_main and GUSH_ad_row

Donations

I have never asked for donations for any of the macks I have done - however since I have spent well over 60 hours coding this - I thought I would stick my neck out there. If you like my mack, it brings you some money and you want to keep my fridge stocked with beer and Cheetos, then feel free to drop some cash in my paypal account: geek@thenailgeek.com
If youre having difficulty keeping beer in the fridge yourself - fill yours before you fill mine.
If you think the mack sucks, or youre just a tight git then please dont bother

nJoy

[beansbaxter]

i direct linked to the admincp admin file for the system, and it just isnt working. i followed the instructions verbatim, using 3.0.7 but cant get it to work. im gonna give up till the final release is out.

[The Geek]

if there is no link in the admincp, then either the autoinstaller couldnt make the change to your admincp-index.php page, or you simply didnt copy it from gish/gab/rc1/admincp

Nothing much can speed things up anymore than they are. IMO, this is totally usable. The couple of things that need tweaking are of minimal consequence. The biggest problem is making it a little more obvious how the system works however once you have it up and running its pretty obvious.

ANyhooo - right now Im on vacation in Spain so there isnt a great deal I can do until I get back. The release of vb3.5 is causing most mackers to spend most of their time rewriting and porting all their stuff over and Im no exception there

[beansbaxter]

Ok, I went to bed last night and woke up this morning determined to get this to work. I created a brand new database and created a fresh new instance of vbulletin 3.07 (just did this for testing purposes before I take it over to the live forum that needs this mod). Did a fresh install of vb and then did a fresh clean install of this GAB modification.

I looked through the install notes...everything was a success. You're right about the phrases not working until you rebuild them, so I did that to correct that problem.

Still no GAB link in the Admin CP Panel, not a problem, I just type in the link to access GAB_admin.php

So I go there to add a new banner. I notice if I choose to upload the banner, I get the following error:

Warning: move_uploaded_file(/home/danielm/domains/randomtime.com/public_html/forum/gab//0/randomcomputers.gif): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /includes/gab_class_admin.php on line 400

Warning: move_uploaded_file(): Unable to move '/tmp/phpFBi63B' to '/home/danielm/domains/randomtime.com/public_html/forum/gab//0/randomcomputers.gif' in /includes/gab_class_admin.php on line 400
Got some freaky error.

So the banners are not uploading, that's where I'm stuck at.

[RGSMDNR]

Originally Posted by RGSMDNR

banners show up fine in both IE and firefox, but when i click one in IE, it brings me to a condensed page of my forum?

so what about my issue?

[The Geek]

do you have a gab folder in your forum dir? Also, check your settings for a trailing slash for your server path. You will see there in the error message that you have 2

rgsmdr - sounds to me like an odd URL option in the banner. Its the same basic redirect regardless of the browser you are using. Can you provide a link?

[RGSMDNR]

well now it wont work in any browser...

http://forums.fordpower.ca

[The Geek]

chances are its just a misconfiguration in the settings.
Can you paste the results from settings->debug?

[SportBikeAddict]

Clicked install. Great hack, and awesome work.

Just two things that I'm having problems with:

1) Created a custom template for an HTML ad I have. This template has been added as a banner in the MASTER Ad Block along with a static banner, but users only see one banner no matter what page the view in their session.

2) When the uploader PUTs a file in the banner directory, it's permissions are set to 600. I have to manually change permissions on each banner. Server config issue on my end?

Thanks so much for taking a glance at this.

[The Geek]

The only thing I noticed at a quick glance is that you only have 1 $GAB_ads in your templates but 2 blocks defined in your Master script which means you need $GAB_ad[1] somewhere to display your other ad block. Stick $GAB_ads[1] somewhere and you will see the second ad block.


Off the top of my head, the banner CHMOD shouldnt be a problem. What happens if you dont chmod it and what are you changing it to?

HTH´s

[steadicamop]

I've just upgraded to 1.6 from 1.1, and I have something strange on advertising.php - top left hand corner, screen grab attached to show what I mean.

Will advertising.php be where people can sign up for new banners? I always thought it would be this, as a place where they can it all themselves .... or am I wrong?

Cheers!

Jason