New Module: Advertisement

I'm pleased to announce the 1.0 release of the Ad Module available for Drupal 4.7.x and Drupal 5.x. Thanks to everyone that helped by beta testing and reporting bugs! With 1.0 out the door, now it's time to utilize the framework that's been built to provide many more useful advertising features.

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. The ad module is fully integrated with the views module, offering fine-grained control over which ads are displayed where and to whom. Installation is simple by design. An API is provided allowing the development of additional functionality and integration with other Drupal modules.

Features:

• auto-generated ad blocks supporting a configurable number of ads
• automatically or manually embed ads into site content
• collection of comprehensive statistics allowing time-based reporting and analysis
• tracking of when and where ads are clicked, by which user and which IP
• integrated with the views module for fine-grained control of which ads are displayed where and to whom
• advertisements can have multiple owners
• granular per-advertisement/per-owner permissions system
• activation/expiration scheduling based on time, clicks or views
• an ad_image plug-in for image (aka banner) ads
• an ad_text plug-in for simple text ads
• an ad_report plug-in for basic graphical reports
• an ad_notify plug-in for scheduling automatic email notifications
• an administrative statistics overview page
• support for any number of configurable ad groups
• file-based caching for improved performance
• support for external caching methods
• views powered 'my ads' pages for listing all ads owned by a given user