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]

Hi Cobra, A couple of things:

1- Can you go into phpMyAdmin (or whatever tool you have for DB access) and delete the datastore row where the title is GAB_settings? If you can, then run the installer again - but only run the settings portion of the installer. That would at least reinstall your scripts so you can set up your ad blocks.

After you do that, make sure that all of your categories are active and make sure the categories you use have the applicible scripts ticked.

Give it a go as soon as possible as I head out on holiday in the morining and want to make sure you are sorted.

[Bernd]

Fixed for the most part.
Deleted settings in datastore as you suggested.

only issue is stats are not working and advertising.php seems to miss allot of stuff?

Stats error

Please select a valid date range
No noticeable errors from the debug page.
site = www.c4dportal.com

One more question. What template holds the html for the display of advertisments?
EDIT: Found the general template under GAB_wrapper_standard

[The Geek]

The stats viewer isnt already finished. That statement doesnt mean there is an error, it means there is no data to show as no dates had been selected or no data is there to display for the dates you selected.

If you are missing data, make sure that the ads categories are set to tracking and make sure that they are images, flash, or rotating ads (cant track hits on text ads).
Also make sure that your impression throttle isnt set too low - or that your GAB_cron_daily job is set up right as this mack is verrrrrry smart in the fact that if there are more impressions to record than your throttle, it will pack them away until the cron job runs - thus saving you many more queries.

Hope this makes sense.

[Bernd]

Originally Posted by The Geek

The stats viewer isnt already finished. That statement doesnt mean there is an error, it means there is no data to show as no dates had been selected or no data is there to display for the dates you selected.

The database itself has recorded 29 hits and I've setup the banner to be trackable from the admin section. A valid starting and end date has also been set for the banner.

This image shows the advertising.php page. No selections can be made there except for the available banners. Clicking jonsmedia provides the mentioned issue in my previous post.


Where do u have to select the dates in this case? I imagine it's a per month thing or something? It may simply be that's the unfinished part you've spoken of, but I'd like to be sure I haven't screwed up the installation.

[The Geek]

huh. Youre right. I was in middle of working on the stats when I uploaded the last package so it wasnt in as proper of an order as I would have liked... however it was working! Gimme a minute and ill see if I can sort it from my end.

[The Geek]

Right. Sorted.

Package upgraded to RC1.6

I only made a couple of minor changes to advertising.php and the GUSH_main template and the GUSH_ad_row template.

To upgrade, download latest package... Upload all files to their respective locations overriding any old files in the process... then run the templates portion of the installer. This will update these two templates. You then may need to revert the GUSH_main and GUSH_ad_row templates.

Then you should be able to view the stats (please remember the viewer isnt done yet - think of this as a preview )

[Bernd]

Thanks

[kafi]

Originally Posted by kafi

Again with baner control
I mean how to organize banners (not AdBlocks) with GAB_ads.

Lets say that:
I have 3 banners and I want to show BANNER#1 in GAB_ads[0] and to have BANNER#2,3 appear rotating or next to each other in GAB_ads[1]

I do not want Banner#2,3 appear in GAB_ads[0] and Banner#1 in GAB_ads[1].

and also side by side banners .-)

[The Geek]

ooof. Sorry mate. I knew there was something else I needed to do!

Ill see if I can sort that tonight. Shouldnt take long at all.

[mkdevo]

Mr. Geek,

i've finally put this into production on my site after testing for about a week. it's fantastic. thank you.

i currently have my GAB at the end of my navbar template. i would also like to put it at the end of my vBPortal navbar template, but that doesn't seem to be working for me. i can't get the GAB to show up on my vBP pages.. i'm not expecting support on this, but would you have any idea as to how to make that work?

thank you again!