Review - phpAdsNew Banner Management System

One of the great things about open source repositories such as SourceForge is that they provide access to a huge amount of quality software produced by talented developers from around the world.

SourceForge is a dream come true for Web developers looking for quality free Web apps and scripts for their open source-driven Websites. One of the most popular apps available on SourceForge is called phpAdsNew. phpAdsNew is a PHP/MySQL driven Web app that allows anyone to integrate ads into their Website.

phpAdsNew is one of the most popular open source ad projects on the Internet. I use it on my own site, and I'd honestly have to say that it's the best ad management system I've ever used. In this article I'll give you a guided tour of phpAdsNew. If you run your own site and attract a couple of thousand visitors each day, then you might want to consider using phpAdsNew to generate some revenue for all your hard work.

What is phpAdsNew?

In my opinion, it's the best ad management system on the Internet. I'm a little biased however, because I love open source software. So here's the "official" description, as seen on the SourceForge page:

I think that description pretty much says it all. At the time of writing this article, phpAdsNew was :

• in mature development stage,
• OS independent, and
• had a 99.8656% activity percentile on SourceForge

which means that it's one of SourceForge's most popular downloads... and with good reason! phpAdsNew is maintained by a team of 9 developers from around the world.

The current release of phpAdsNew is version 2 beta 6.1, which you can download here. Grab either the tar (262k) or zip (378k) version, and extract it into a folder on your Web server. By default, the folder will be called something like phpAdsNew_2.61, but rename it to phpAdsNew.

Next off we need to configure the details of our database. Open the config.inc.php file in your phpAdsNew directory and look for the following lines at the top of the file:

/*********************************************************/  
/* Database configuration */  
/*********************************************************/  

// MySQL hostname  
$phpAds_hostname = "localhost";  

// MySQL username  
$phpAds_mysqluser = "mysqlusername";  

// MySQL password  
$phpAds_mysqlpassword = "mysqlpassword";  

// The database phpAdsNew lives in  
$phpAds_db = "phpads";

You must change the variables shown above to match the details of the Web server where you have MySQL installed, in order for phpAdsNew to work. To make the $phpAds_db variable function, a database with that name must exist on your MySQL server, so fire up the MySQL console application and enter the following:

create database phpads;  
exit;

Next, find the administrator configuration section in config.inc.php and change the value of $phpAds_admin, which is the username we will use shortly to login to phpAdsNew. You should also change $phpAds_admin_pw to a suitable password.

Lastly, modify the variables under the phpAdsNew configuration section. Save config.inc.php and visit http://yourserver/phpadsnew in your Web browser. Obviously, you need to replace "yourserver" in the address above with either the name or IP address of the server onto which you installed phpAdsNew.