freeform text ads

"To me -rc3 and -dev are neither "official" release designations. Both sound unstable. Which should I try."

The last "official" release is 1.0-1 which you can find by clicking "view all releases" on the ad project page. The "-rc" releases are what I hope to become the next official release, assuming no further regressions are found. I believe -rc3 is quite stable and will very likely become the official 1.1 release. Of course, when I tagged -rc1 I thought it was going to be 1.1, then we had -rc2, and now -rc3. The more people that test the "-rc" releases, the better the quality of the next official release.

"I need to put specific ads on specific pages and that's all."

If it's just one ad per page, probably the easiest way to do this would be to create custom blocks, each configured to only display on one specific page. Put PHP code in the blocks that calls ad() as described in the README.txt file distributed with the ad module. For example, if in one block you want to display the ad that has an nid of 17 in that block you would call:

    ad(NULL, 1, array('nids' => 17));

If instead you have multiple ads for each page and want to randomly display one of them, you could assign the ads to groups. You'd create one group for every page. You could then use the automatically generated blocks, configuring each block to only display on a specific page. (You can use this same method to display one specific ad on each page -- just add on ad to each group, then you don't have to write any PHP code.)

From reading through your problem report, it sounds like you should first read through INSTALL.txt and README.txt to get a better understanding of how the ad module works. Please review the project's documentation before asking questions here.

The ad module supports two types of ads via plugins: 1) locally hosted text ads with the ad_text module, and 2) locally hosted image ads with the ad_image module.

You must enable one of these two plugins to use the ad module. You can then create that ad type using Drupal's "Create content" interface.

BTW: Thanks, I've updated INSTALL.txt.

It sounds like you are asking to include html in your text ads, a duplicate of this feature request.

Yes, unfortunately what you describe is not supported, and is not a planned feature. One problem being that it would be difficult to track clickthroughs.

I will leave this feature request open, perhaps someone else will come along and need this and contribute the code.

What do you want the module to do for you? If you're just putting a specific ad in a block on a specific page, and don't need to track anything, it is much easier to just do that with the block module.

You can now use the ad_html module included with the current development version of the ad module to do what you need.