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

[m0nde]

I still haven't been able to get this script working with my board and I've noticed that others have had the same problems.

In the mean time, I've integrated phpAdsNew into my vBulletin 3.0.7 board with much success.

I think that if someone wants the features of this module completely integrated into vBulletin, then they should wait for GAB. But for those who want a functional ad engine with zones, etc. they should use phpAdsNew and then once GAB is ready and ported to 3.5 they should use that since the geek always does an excellent job with his installers.

- Sid

[rrr]

But for those who want a functional ad engine with zones, etc. they should use phpAdsNew

I prefer adpeeps over phpads new for just general serving of banners. It's a bit more automated.

[The Geek]

I have finally gotten around to fixing the most common install issues (packages not installing and phrase missing to add new template).

Sorry I didnt get time to do this before - I have just been swamped.

On a side note - I started (another) re-write of this mack to make a vb3.5 port as painless as possible (I want to work on this but dont want to waste my time creating something that would need a rewrite for vb3.5).
Progress is coming along quite well. If I dont get too sidetracked I should have something soon (yaya - Ive been saying that for awhile but Im feeling Lucky now). In the meantime this small update should sort out those that have had install and set up issues (dont bother with it if you have it going).

[grecostimpy]

Originally Posted by The Geek

Greco - a common mistake that you may want to check is that you do not have a usergroup set to turn the ads off with a blank value in the - er - value box (hope that makes sense!).

Not quite making out what you mean here. Could you explain a little more detailed? Much appreciated.

Thanks! :squareeyed:

[mkdevo]

don't really want to go through 25 pages to find out, but can someone tell me if this works with text-based ads (like Google AdSense) or not? thanks...

[The Geek]

mkdevo - not yet - next version does. Fingers crossed should be out in next couple of days

greco- If you have any of the 'usersgroups that can toggle ads off' ticked, there is a drop down box that specifies which usergroup field to check to see if they want the option off - then there is a value box that indicates what the value should be if its off.
Frequently, I have helped people trouble shoot where they have a usergroup selected, something like the 'biography' drop down selected and then the value is blank.
Which essentially means those usergroups that are ticked with nothing in their bio will be choosing NOT to see an ad.
Another common problem is that there is a section to indicate which usergroups see ads - yet none have been ticked which means that no usergroups are set to view the ads!

Hope this makes sense!

[kafi]

Geek does it, after last update, view&hit database recording already?

[The Geek]

Hey Kafi - I only fixed a couple of install errors in this update... however:

Progress Update

I have just spent most of my weekend recoding this thing from scratch and although I was hoping to have it done tonight - it really shouldnt take more than another day (maybe two) for the final release. All I have left to do is finish the admincp and create a new installer.

This new version is coded using oop so that writing the vb3.5 version is little more than changing a couple variables and tweaking the installer. That also means users can rest assured that when using this on 3.07, an upgrade to 3.5 is a snap.

I also finally mastered the ability to have it spit out flash ads, static ads, rotating ads and/or text ads (ie adsense). You can also have multiple types on a page (i.e. a rotating banner at the top and adsense at the bottom). You can have as many ads as you want on a page, in any combination (although right now you cant have a flash AND a rotating banner on the same page). You could even use the new system to display popup adverts pretty easily if you wanted to.

Its far more customizable and more powerful than the previous version.

The new version uses the same type of impression/click stat recording/displaying system as GAL does meaning that the GUSH system wont be too hard to create (for thoseof you that havent followed development - GUSH is the system that will snap on to this and/or Geek Autolinker to allow you to sell ads and/or keywords and have users manage it all by themselves).

All in all Im pretty damn chuffed with myself - although banner scripts are not fundamentally difficult to create - it has been a serious challange to make this as flexible as possible for as many people as possible. Whether you are someone who only wants a simple banner on certain pages for certain usergroups or someone who wants to bombard users with 50 different custom types of adverts - this baby does it and more.

Stay tuned.

[uReside.com]

wooohooo i'm so excited!!!

[mkdevo]

can't wait! nicely done!!