Dilema - like D6 but some needed modules arent (fully) available yet
bitshift - January 2, 2009 - 03:12
Ive been using D6 now for over a month now and really like the new features with the views, but I also need the Advertisement module which still has issues with the D6 version. Anyone else in this predicament ?
Personally I'm considering
Personally I'm considering using an external open source ad system. The one I'm leaning toward, Open X, has a long reliable history (used to be called phpAdsNew) and substantial features. There's a demo available to try out before installing it. Most parts of a site, of course, you wouldn't want to do this, but in the case of ads I think it should be fine. I was a bit turned away from Advertisement module when I read a while back in the Issue queue the creator/maintainer saying he would not be starting on the D6 version until the time he personally needed it for one of his own projects (evidently it has been worked on since then). But that statement worried me (with something so important to an ad-supported site... my server costs hundreds/mo which ads have to pay for). Not blaming him at all (after all its free and he's contributing his time/effort for free).
I haven't looked at them carefully yet, but there's also a few Open X related modules:
http://drupal.org/project/openx
http://drupal.org/project/openx_manager
What features of Advertisement module do you specifically need, and can they not be provided by something like Open X? Are there specific bugs keeping you from being able to use Advertisement module, or is it just that its D6 version is new and still in dev?
-- David
davidnewkerk.com | absolutecross.com
View my Drupal lessons & guides
Thank you, I was reading a
Thank you, I was reading a bit on the openx website. Im still not sure I understand what it offers. Let me see if I have the basics right - you can define the advertising real estate you have available and the prices for each. Then advertisers that have bought your space do so and the ads are displayed (pulled) onto your website ? So how does one get paid and manage the ad campains - through an account on the openx website ?
Basically what im after is a mix of display google adsense and direct ad space sales where a company xyz contacts me and wants to display their banner for a set period of time for a set fee. Thats it in a nutshell.
Interestingly, OpenX's
Interestingly, OpenX's website runs on Drupal :D That's nice since clearly they will understand Drupal and will be testing the system in relation to Drupal. You can either choose OpenX hosted or download OpenX which runs on your own server. If you do this you could put it on a sub-domain such as ads.example.com (which is what I plan to do).
For the benefits and limits of Hosted see the right block on http://www.openx.org/ad-server/get-openx-hosted
If you use OpenX Hosted it looks like one possible benefit is the OpenX Market, which appears to be something where you can have them fill some or all of your ad space for you. So you'd get paid by them for "those" ads if you did that... get paid by your own clients for direct ad sales... and get paid by Google for AdSense.
Either local or hosted looks like it will facilitate a "mix of display google adsense and direct ad space sales"... I'm not clear yet whether it has any form of integration with an automated billing process, though in any case I'm sure you can at the very least 1) Receive payment from company xyz for a certain time period, or X number of impressions or clicks (again, you can certainly collect payment in any manual or separate online ordering system, I just haven't found an answer yet whether a company can directly buy ads in an automated fashion)... 2) Create a Company entry in OpenX as the login/home/etc for that particular company (they can login and see stats, etc)... 3) Create a campaign for the company and set the limits of how many impressions or clicks they bought, add the text or images of the ads, and decide in which Zones of your site those ads appear in... 4) Start the campaign.... when the time, impressions, clicks, or whatever run out, the ads stop showing and a new payment is due.
Hope this helps. I'll be installing it soon myself and trying to integrate it as needed with my Drupal site.
-- David
davidnewkerk.com | absolutecross.com
View my Drupal lessons & guides
Looking for the same
I would use an external ad application, problem is I would like the ads to be displayed based on taxonomy. Sort of like google adsense, where the ads are displayed based on the content in the node.
A drupal module would be whats best for this I would assume. An external application would have to be hacked to read the drupal database or use some sort of crawler bot like google adsense does.
Guess i should just wait for a d6 release of the advertisement mod