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

[COBRAws]

same "Could not find phrase 'GAS_settings_saved'." error here hehe

edit:

well, i found another "bug". You need to create the "gab" DIR on your forums root and chmod it to 777 so uploaded banners can be stored.

I also tryed to manually add the GAB_settings_saved and nothing worked. There is a GAS_settings_saved phrase that came on screen once, dont know what i did before i saw it, but it seems to be written wrong on some part of the script.

Finally, the $GAB_ad1 is not installed when you run the complete v2beta installer, so i had to go to my templates and put it there.

After all this I have said, Geek Advertising Banner works like a charm! (Those phrases errors still apear, but doesnt seem to affect the script).

I hope I could help you out a little The Geek, thanks for this hack.

[Hanif]

Geek,

Any news on this eagerly waiting for the official release.

Ta,

Hanif

[The Geek]

Working on it now. Problem is all of it is another freaking rewrite so its going slower than planned. However fingers crossed I may have the admincp done tonight or tomorrow and then its just the installer (All code is finished).

The next release will be an RC and should have everything complete except for phrases and the stats. The stats will be recording but the stats viewer will follow within a few days as there is some more work to do on it (however that shouldnt hold back the release!).

[The Geek]

Progress update

o so close.

Sorry guys - I have just ran out of time today. Was planning on winding up a package today - but the sun actually came out in England (which is a rarity on a weekend) and I had some family obligations to attend to. Therefore I didnt get as much time into it as I was hoping too.

The good news is that aside from the stats viewer (which I will wait to release until the following RC) - I am 98% done with everything (code and admincp).
I have another couple hours backend coding, then I need to write the installer/upgrader, and a readme. All things said and done I am looking at about 5 more hours or so (not bad considering im well into 60 hours+ for this).

Anyhooo - release could come damn near at any time (except for tonight that is! Im going to bed).

Realistically - look Tues or Wed

[beansbaxter]

I'm gonna hold out then till Tue or Wed...lookin VERY VERY forward to it as I need it bad...

Do you have an email addy I can send a PayPal donation to??

[Hanif]

thanks for the update Geek,

Good point baxter I was thinking the same thing,

I'm prepared to pay you a little for your work that you have been doing on this. I think it's only right that you do get some payment. Ok it won't get you to sunny Spain but it's the thought that counts !!! .

As we all have families to feed and above all if its an advert system, surely many of us will be making some money on our site by using your mod.

Let me know dude when and where to send it.

Yours,

Hanif in sunny Leeds !

[Divokymuz]

i did not install it till now, but what i read gives me hope :-)

Geek, i want to thank you, for all the time you spend helping the community and working on such hacks. realy great.

but now i have a question too :-) who supposed it ?

i read that you did not work with phpads. ok. it´s a great advertising software.
can you tell me, if it is possible to integrate normal phpads html code or iFrame into your adv-hack for vB ?

[The Geek]

I have actually been planning on putting up a dontation button with this release. I always tried to avoid it as I dont do this for donations - I do it because the macks I release are ones I use and if it hleps the community - then cool - so be it. However Im over it now If someone wants to donate - they will be able to with the next release

Most of the admincp is now complete. The installer is now done. I even phrased the damn thing now. Only thing thats missing is the test option, the stats option, and some fine tuning to bring it all together.
I am testing it and tweaking - Tuesday is looking to be the day (hell - maybe even tonight if I get really lucky).

Div - If I understand you right then yes. Basically the new system allows you to use a template as an ad. Meaning you can have 1 or 1,000 templates containg anything from HTML to BBcode to Iframes, whatever - and then set a flag to say thats your ad.

[FamilyCorner]

Please forgive me if I missed this somewhere in this thread, but I didn't see it.

I am looking for a way to run my ad network banner tags (Iframes) and have them refresh every 60 seconds. I have the banner in a frame in my chatroom, but would prefer not to have to implement frames on the entire forum.

Does this have refresh banners for you when someone has been sitting on a page for a certain period of time?

(please say yes!)

If not, does anyone know of such an animal? I am definitely willing to give a donation for a hack that can do this for me as it would significantly increase my revenue.

[The Geek]

there is a rotating banner facility however these are only for images (but now I think about it Im sure something could be tweaked) however all you need to do is use something like this (well - next version) - have one of the custom templates be an iframe to an iframe with a 60 second refresh.

Not overly difficult to do

[FamilyCorner]

Really?? I am SO ready for this, when will it be released? Can you assist in the "tweaking", or is that something you'll have available in the next version? And when?

Can you tell I'm excited??

[Divokymuz]

yeah, you understood me right.

great to hear this.

[The Geek]

Whelp - you should all be about ready to smell it.

There is now very little left for me to do (except for the readme a template or two, the stat viewer and the tester).
Ill be releasing tomorrow for sure.

Heres a few shots to wet your appetite.

[enginethatcan't]

Getting the Could not find phrase 'GAS_settings_saved'

how can I fix it?

[The Geek]

Originally Posted by enginethatcan't

Getting the Could not find phrase 'GAS_settings_saved'


how can I fix it?

I wouldnt bother. For 1 it has no bearing on the functionality and for another, the new version will be out later today.