Hits And Misses - PHP

Once your customers have diligently uploaded their images and created their banners, you need to activate them (after you've got their money, of course!) So click on the "Admin Page" link, enter your password (you did add authentication to this page, didn't you?) and then select the "Banner" menu item.

If all goes well, you will see a neat listing of all the banners that have been uploaded by your client(s) to the site, as below:

Click the name of the banner image and the following screen gives you more information about it:

Once you have checked that the client as well as the banner are authentic, go back to the listing screen and click the "Edit" link next to the banner. You'll be taken to the "Modify Banner" screen, which looks like this:

The "Keyword" value allows you to specify a word to be associated with the banner. As you will soon see, this is useful when it comes to displaying custom banners at specific locations on your site.

The "Hits Reserved" value represents the number of the times that the selected banner will be displayed on your site, while the "Clicks Reserved" parameter allows you to decide the number of clicks on the banner. How do these work? Simple: the banner will automatically be disabled once it exceeds the values specified for both the "Hits Reserved" and "Clicks Reserved" parameters. So, if you have set a banner to 10 hits but 25 clicks, the banner will continue appearing until it receives 25 clicks. Keep this in mind when you decide the values for these parameters.

Once we are done with these banner-specific parameters, use the "Active" flag to enable the banner and allow it to be displayed on your site. And yes, you can turn off a banner at any time by just setting this value to "disable".