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

[DougM]

Agreed. I've installed the old trusty phpAdsNew on the site for which the highly anticipated hack is to be used, so getting by for now.

I hope being 3.5 compliant won't make it <3.5 non-compliant.

[uReside.com]

geeze, everytime i turn around its another upgrade!

[The Geek]

Originally Posted by uReside.com

geeze, everytime i turn around its another upgrade!

er - I havent released an upgrade for this in about a month

You need to turn around slower

[Slave]

Originally Posted by The Geek

Working on it - however I doubt you will see much till I get a look at vb3.5 as I dont want to invest a crap load of time only to redo it again.

HI Geek

While I think it's good that you're looking forward to 3.5 .. I would ask that you keep working on 3.0.X hacks for the time being ..

The reason I say this is that I, and I'm sure a few others, wont be upgrading to 3.5 until all the hacks are upgraded .. which I suspect wont be for a long time.

I'm just asking that you keep this in mind.

[The Geek]

Hey slave - the problem is that regardless, people will eventually move onto 3.5 (myself included) so I dont see a lot of point working to a depreciated version

Lately, my time has become very limited for macking and I want to make sure I spend the time I have wisely.

[uReside.com]

subscribing again...

[Nuckolsc.com]

When I tried to add a banner I got this:
Warning: copy(./gab/punishers.gif): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /admincp/GAB_admin.php on line 716

Did I do something wrong on the setup or do I need to do something to that file? Any help would be great.. thanks man.

[The Geek]

make sure you have a folder called gab in your forum directory that is chmodded to 0777

[Nuckolsc.com]

Originally Posted by The Geek

make sure you have a folder called gab in your forum directory that is chmodded to 0777

That fixed that problem but after doing all of the fields for the banner in the admincp I now have this message:
vBulletin Message

Could not find phrase 'GAB_settings_saved'.

Know whats wrong. Thanks again man...

[djsydeburnz]

i have a couple of questions.

got it installed in 3.0.7 and vbadvanced 1.0.1

the banner ads show up if i access the forum directly, but if i access a forum from the cmps_index.php page, it does not show up on the front page of the portal site, or any of the forum pages that i visit using the links from the front page. BUT, if I click on the main forum in the breadcrumb area, i can see the banners again.

in my admincp, the link for adding banners doesnt show up. just a small cell that changes color when i hover it, and it is clickable. it is just real tiny and no text.