Review - phpAdsNew Banner Management System

Once the add new banner page loads, there are four possible types of banners that we can create:

Banner stored in SQL

This option allows you to upload an image directly into the phpAdsNew MySQL database. It's stored as a blob, and you don't have to worry about storing image files on your server.

Banner stored on the Web server

If you'd like to store your banner images on your Web server, then choose this option.

Banner references to through URL

This option allows you to reference a banner that's available online (i.e. http://...). If you're running banners as part of an ad network, then this is the option that you're after.

HTML banner

HTML banners are ideal for rich media ads such as flash movies, or even plain text ads, which generally have a great click-thru rate (CTR).

For this article, we'll create a banner stored in SQL, so select that option and choose/create a banner from your hard drive. I have created a simple 468x60 banner. Once you click on the submit ad button, phpAdsNew will show you how your banner will look. Here's what mine looked like:

Now that our banner's been created, it's time to tell phpAdsNew to generate the banner code for it, which we can include in our Web pages to display the banner. Click on the administration tab and then the generate banner code link, just under the tab. Once again, there are several options to choose from. The way the banner is invocated can be one of five possible options:

• Remote Invocation: An image tag will be generated that points to the location of phpAdsNew's adview.php script, passing in the ID of the client whose banner we want to display.
• Remote Invocation with JavaScript: Generates a <script> tag which references adjs.php, which uses JavaScript's document.write function to display the banner.
• Remote Invocation for iFrames: Generates an <iframe> tag that references adframe.php. Adframe.php returns the image so it's displayed inside of the iFrame.
• Combined Remote Invocation: Uses a combination of an <iframe> tag and <script> tag to generate a banner called from JavaScript based inside of an iFrame.
• Local Mode: PHP code that includes phpadsnew.inc.php and calls that scripts view function. This is the default mode, however if you're using MySQL in other areas of your site to display data, then I would recommend staying away from this option.

Once you've chosen your banner display options, you'll need to select the banner to be displayed from the ClientID drop down list. If you'd like the URL that the banner links to open in a new window, enter something like _blank in the target field. In this example I'm using remote invocation, so here's the code that phpAdsNew generated when I clicked on the generate button:

<a href='http://localhost/phpAdsNew/adclick.php' target='_blank'><img    
src='http://localhost/phpAdsNew/adview.php?clientID=2&target=_blank'    
border='0'></a>

Obviously at this point, it's simply a matter of copying and pasting the generate code into your Web page, and then saving it.

At this point we haven't really explored the capabilities of phpAdsNew, so let's now take a look at its powerful reporting and banner rotation features.