Commercial Break (A phpAds Primer) - Different Strokes (
Page 4 of 9 )
Once a client has been
added to the system, the next step is to add banners for that client. Use the
banner administration link on the main control panel to select the newly-added
client, and you'll see a page that looks like this:
Obviously, there's nothing very interesting here yet,
primarily because you haven't yet added any banners. So how about rectifying
that, via the "add new banner" link?
Now,
phpAds allows three kinds of banner ads:
1. An image banner stored in the
database. Here, the system requires you to upload an image, which is saved in
the database as a binary object and retrieved whenever required.
2. An
image banner accessed via a URL: In this case, the system requires you to
specify a URL for the banner, and uses this URL to retrieve the banner whenever
needed.
3. An HTML banner: In this case, the banner is not an image, but
HTML code. This allows for more innovative banners, which may include form
controls or table-formatted text.
Obviously, a banner also needs to
point to something - which is why phpAds also requires you to enter a target URL
for each of the three banner types listed above. For the image banners, you can
also specify a line of text to be printed below the image.
Finally,
phpAds also allows you to specify keywords for each banner that you display.
These keywords are descriptive terms related to the content of the banner, or to
the client, and come in handy when deciding which banner to display on which
page.
Once you've added a banner, it gets saved to the database, and
phpAds takes you back to the banner administration screen, where you can
deactivate, modify or delete the banner.
Pretty simple, huh? Go ahead,
try it out yourself - add a couple of banners of each type to the system to see
how it works, and then flip the page to see how you can integrate the ad rotator
into your Web site.
