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

[The Geek]

try downloading the latest version and then uploading the files replacing the existing ones. Chances are that its a bad upload.

HTH's

[thephonemall]

Geek: I loved your Article hack (still tweaking it) and I needed an ad management system so I came back to you. Had to manual install again which was no problem, however, I seemed to have followed all your suggestions in the readme and checks in the templates but I can not get an Ad to appear either in Banner edit in AdminCP or on my forums index. $GAB_ads[0] is in the navbar.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
I will PM you my adminCP details in case you are able to take a look yourself.
Thanks so much!

[The Geek]

sorted. Im only posting this as an FYI for anyone else having problems:

Please make sure that the path to the gab folder (in your settings) is relative and not absolute.
Please also make sure that the categories the ad is in is set to the correct type (ie flash banners in flash categories, etc...)
These are easy things to mix up and can cause frustration if not done right

[jdingman]

While just starting to run the installer

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: globalize() in /home/lyrics/public_html/forums/admincp/gab_install.php on line 44

Any ideas?

[RichieBoy67]

Hey Geek,

I am just wondering if it is possible to easily get this mod to allow rotating banners in the forums as well as in the header, footer etc.. Can we easily add alternate rotating banners that will only be shown in certain forums???

If not I would like to see if this can be done fairly easily? Otherwise I am stuck with 2 rotation scripts runing at the same time...

Thanks

[The Geek]

jdingman - sounds like your trying to run this on a 3.5 installation which its not designed to do

Richie - If I understand you correctly - yea. Can you layout what exactly you are trying to accomplish?

[mawtenbiker]

Getting this when I go to add new banner? How do i fix this?

Geek Advertising Banner System

Warning: move_uploaded_file(/home/sgcivics/public_html/forum/gab//0/atco.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/phpIzEWZR' to '/home/sgcivics/public_html/forum/gab//0/atco.gif' in /includes/gab_class_admin.php on line 400
Got some freaky error.

[jdingman]

Originally Posted by The Geek

jdingman - sounds like your trying to run this on a 3.5 installation which its not designed to do

Oh... I guess I missed that part. Yes, I am running 3.5.0 RC2. Do you know when this plugin will be available for 3.5.x?

[The Geek]

its in the works - but then again so are all my macks and time is cramped. Sorry I cant give you a firmer answer.

mawtenbiker - looks like you have an extra slash in your settings.

[jdingman]

Could you give a rough estimate, like say a month, a year, a week, or whatever it might be? I would really like to use this and I'm hoping 3.5.x will go GOLD soon =)

[mawtenbiker]

well i removed the slash and it still tells me the same thing just now that extra slash dont show up.

[The Geek]

Originally Posted by mawtenbiker

just

Should be reading gab/images/0/etc... I think your paths are squwompus.

It will most likely be two to three weeks for gas. I still have a good week to get my advertising system done for my site and then ill spend all my time on GAS. The majority of the hard stuff is done - however its a mamouth mack and that makes it very hard to guage how its going to come along. Regardless... Its one of the key things that will prevent me from upgrading and Im very keen to upgrade asap so rest assured its a very high priority.

[mawtenbiker]

figured it out. I didn't have my chmod set on my folders to write. thanks for the help and quick response.

[Protoman]

anybody have a copy of the beta still? I can't seem to get rid of the settings saying I'm using Beta 2.0 since I don't have the original installer/uninstaller any more.

also, tried installing rc1.6 again and got this error:

PHP Code:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /includes/gab_class_core.php on line 189

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /includes/gab_class_core.php on line 250 


running on PHP5

[RichieBoy67]

Hi geek,

I am trying to get the script to allow forums to have their own specific rotating banners seperate from the banner rotating in the header template...

Thanks