Releases for Advertisement

The 6.x-2.0 version of the ad module introduces channels, weighting, and premier advertisements, offering much greater control over which advertisements appear on your website, where they appear, and how often they appear. The ability to display advertisements on remote websites has also seen several improvements. The ad module's reporting layer has received many enhancements, among other things allowing advertisers to run reports over specific date ranges, and giving administrators the ability to export statistics as CSV files. The underlying caching layer has been completely rewritten, simplifying the underlying code to minimize bugs, facilitating integration with third party code, and improving overall performance.

The entire code base has been reviewed to ensure E_ALL compliance, ensuring general correctness, and improving security. Thanks to the active participation of dozens of beta testers, there have been countless bugs fixed during the active development phase.

Finally, the ad module's permissions system has been greatly improved. All standard Drupal content-type permissions have been properly implemented, and the ad module's own permissions layer has been moved into an optional module and further enhanced. The ability to define different advertiser roles and to control exactly what each of these roles can do has been greatly improved.

New features::

• #421026: add notification events for an advertisement being taken offline, and for an advertisement being updated
• #421038: allow weighting of non-channel advertisements
• #421054: enforce optional maximum filesize for image ads, enforce maximum size, and minimum/maximum height and width on remotely hosted images in addition to locally hosted images

Bug fixes:

• #376924: list ad_owner as ad_cache_file dependency
• #400734: validate cache element exists before using it
• #404888: properly display advertisements and increment impressions when using the raw method to display advertisements
• #419140: always be sure $permissions is an array
• #421008: make premier status configurable to anyone with 'configure premier status' permission
• #421046: optionally limit the number of channels that can be assigned to a single advertisement
• #422936: add missing extra fields from table definitions
• #425482: support older versions of PHP when building cache
• #426292: sanitize ad channel urls, trimming white space from start and end of lines to be sure they match as expected
• #426300: allow the deletion of channels and containers
• #431806: use valid XHTML when displaying advertisements
  

New features:

• feature #173176: support for default notifications with optional per-role granularity
• select ad type with inline AHAH switcher (patch thanks to "neochief")
• feature #416164: optionally display ad channel on admin ads listing page in addition to or instead of ad group
• feature #386796: add ability for modules to modify reports, introduce per-channel reports
• by default, only rebuild cache when cron runs. Set 'ad_cache_file_rebuild_realtime' to TRUE in settings.php $conf array to restore old behavior of rebuilding cache whenever advertisements are changed.
• improve debug output, adding timestamps and memory information
• improve debug output when rebuilding file cache

Bug fixes:

• bug #416110: build proper joins when filtering by channel or premiere status
• bug #404892: only display reports tab and notify tab on advertisement nodes
• Fixed numerous E_ALL notices and warnings.
• only add/update weight probability information when working with ads
• don't rebuild cache multiple times when setting weight probability
• remove unintentional call-time pass-by-references during upgrade

March 3rd, 2009 (6.x-2.0-beta2)
- ad_cache_file.module
o fix PHP E_ALL notices
- ad_image.install
o feature #388712: add remote_image field for remotely hosting images
- ad_image.module
o feature #388712: optionally allow images to be hosted remotely
(must go to "Administer > Content management > Ads > Settings > Image ad"
and check "Allow remote hosted images" to use this feature.)
- ad.module
o allow ad-type module global settings changes to be saved
- ad_owners.module
o allow ad-type module global settings changes to be saved

March 2nd, 2009
- ad_channel
o bug #388720: display channels by name, not by description
- ad_remote
o bug #387164: generate proper snippet for tracking remote url

- ad_owners.module
o rename ad_host_id_create to ad_owners_create_hostid for consistency
- ad_remote.module
o replace call to ad_host_id_create with ad_owners_create_hostid
- ad_weight_probability.module
o bug #386816: new ads default to a weight of 1
- ad_html.module
o fix PHP E_ALL notices
- ad.pages.inc
o bug #386824: fix grammatical typo
- ad_channel.module
o feature #386810: set channel after ad group
o feature #386820: display channels when viewing node (if have 'administer
channels' permissions)

The ad module is a powerful advertising system for Drupal-powered websites. It supports the random display and tracking of graphical (banner) and text ads. Ads can easily be displayed in themes, blocks, or embedded in site content. The module records comprehensive statistics about when and how often ads are viewed and clicked, including a plug-in module for generating graphical time-based reports. Ads can be assigned to multiple owners, each of which can be assigned their own set of permissions. Installation is simple by design. An API is provided allowing the development of additional functionality and integration with other Drupal modules.

First 6.x release candidate.
SA-CONTRIB-2009-007 - Advertisement Cross-site scripting

Latest development version of the ad module -- development has stopped in this branch, and was moved to the 6.x-2.x branch. It is doubtful that this branch will ever have a stable release.