Managing phpAdsNew - Administration

In this concluding section, I'll attempt to give you a quick overview of the final top-level module of phpdAdsNew, which is the "Settings" module. At the onset, I must admit that I'll not be able to give you the "complete" picture; the number of options and tweaks are far too many to be covered in a single paragraph. So, I'll concentrate on the important ones!

Fire up your browser and log on to the Administration module. Click on the only option that you haven't clicked so far, i.e. the "Settings" tab, to view the following screen:

Don't be alarmed if you see a warning that informs you that your "configuration" file is not locked; you can always change the permissions on this file to "read-only," as documented in the first part of this series. 

At first glance, this module gives you access to four sub-modules:

1. Main settings: Here, you can modify almost all application settings such as database access details, administrator settings, interface details and more.
   
2. Maintenance: This section allows you to manage the finer details of phpAdsNew, such as the priority of the banners based on past behavior and the internal caches used by the application to server banners.
   
3. Product Updates: This section allows you to keep your instance of phpAdsNew up-to-date by communicating with the official website. Note that the server needs to be connected to the Internet in order to retrieve this information.
   
4. User log: This section allows you to review the activities of the different users, i.e. advertisers and publishers, that log on to the system -- a convenient mechanism for monitoring the usage of the application.

Now that you have a brief idea of the different sub-sections, I will proceed to tell you more about the "Main settings" sub-section.

Here, you can access all the different features by selecting the appropriate option from the drop down menu. While there are several options that you can tweak and play around with, I will concentrate on the critical ones.

Select "Invocation and delivery settings" from the drop down to view the following screen.

This screen allows you to select the different mechanisms that you (or third-party publishers) can use to serve banners from phpAdsNew. Here, you could also specify whether you would like to use the "database" or "files" to cache the banners. I recommend the database option as I am confident of the capabilities of MySQL to handle the potential loads on the database that this may bring about!

Next, you have the "Statistics settings." Here, you can control the manner in which the statistics are generated and more importantly, you can block specific IP addresses and hostnames from being logged. It would be a good idea to block the users that access your websites with the sole aim of increasing AdViews and AdClicks.  This should prevent fraudulent third-party publishers, if any, from misusing the system, ensuring that advertisers stick around for longer!

The "Banner settings" section allows you to tweak the default image and URL. If specified, this combination is used by phpAdsNew in the unlikely event that it cannot display any banners from its existing inventory. Here, you can also control the types of banner ads that are available to publishers; choose from local banners (SQL or Web server), external banners, HTML banners or text-based ads.

On a lighter note, the "User Interface Configuration" section permits you to customize the interface by allowing you to modify the name displayed in the header frame or, if you are HTML-savvy, you could design your own header and footer files for phpAdsNew.

Want to greet your advertisers with cheerful messages? No problem, just store the MOTD (Message Of The Day) in the "Welcome text" text box and you are done!

Yes, there is a whole lot more in this section. But, I'll leave it to your sense of discovery and desire for learning to investigate the other features of the "Settings" section and yes, do not forget to share the results of your experiments with fellow readers!

Conclusion

Whew!

Finally, after three long articles with more than six thousand words interspersed with thirty odd screen shots, I have reached the end of my three part phpAdsNew series. It has been a long journey: right from the installation of the application to its configuration, from the creation of advertisers, campaigns, publishers, zones, banners to the generation of mind numbing statistics. The bottom line: I hope this series will help you to capitalize on the popularity of your website. And if you happen to become the next dot-com millionaire, feel free to send me a big thank-you "note" (pun intended)!

On a more serious note, if you're interested in learning more about this tool, take a look at the following URLs:

The official phpAdsNew Web site: http://www.phpadsnew.com

phpAdsNew Support Forums: http://forum.phpadsnew.com/ 

Here are some alternative PHP-based Banner Management tools that you might want to try out:

phpBanner: http://product.cybergl.co.id/dev/version.php?cmd=browse&product_id=3

phpLedAds: http://www.ledscripts.com/free/php/phpledads

iDevAdMan v1.0 (Commercial) - http://www.idevdirect.com/idevadman.php
That’s about it from me for the moment. Till next time, take care!