New Joomla! banner component
I was recently working on a Joomla! site which required a fairly unusual banner management system. The spec was that the user would be able to enter a list of banners, links, start dates and expiry dates, and that these banners would be displayed in a random order in the main content area. The component will accept all major image formats, and flash movie files. (.swf)
I wasted quite a bit of time trying to mold other components to my needs, but I could have saved myself some time if I had just written my own!
Here we are, then; the result of my labour.
This component requires Joomla 1.5 or later.
LICENSE + DISCLAIMER:Copyright 2008 John McCollum. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
By downloading this component, you are indicating your acceptance of the terms above. Please make sure you back up your files and database before installing this component.
Click here to download the component!
EDIT – by popular demand, I’ve written a simple module to interact with this component. It simply loads a random image or .swf into a module position, based on dates supplied by the user. Note – you must download the component to use the module, although you can use the component on its own!
Tags: advertising, banners, CMS, content management systems, Joomla
Hi
nice work hope you will put this up on the joomla directory as well!
rgds
Hey Darb,
Thanks for all your encouragement! I’ve taken your advice and notified the JED, hopefully it should be listed there soon.
John
Good to see that you have put it up on JED!
Thanks from the Joomla community!
rgds
[...] Download [...]
[...] I’ve written a companion module for my Joomla advertising component. [...]
[...] I’ve received a surprising number of questions and comments from users regarding my Easy Ad Banner component and module for Joomla. [...]
component will not install. keep getting this:
\install_48920111a7d8d\com_advertising\admin\site\index.html’ does not exist
by the way, install_48920111a7d8d\ does not exist.
module installed fine.
Hi Candy, thanks for the feedback. Sorry to hear about your problem – if you could email at john AT johnmccollum.co.uk, I’ll do what I can to help.
Installed component & module – works great!
It would be cool to set the bg-color for flash and add some custom flashvars because most banners have clicktags inside, so the vars for this have to be send to the flashmovie. And an option for opening a new window (“_blank”) when clicking the banner would be nice, too.
Keep on your good work & thanks a lot!
Hi I get this error message install_48984972565f3/com_advertising/admin/site/index.html’ does not exist is this because I run Joomla 1.5.3?
Excelente trabajo todo perfecto, gracias.
I noticed that you have Google adwords…did you use your component/module to set that up? If so, how?
@Calvin – no, this site doesn’t use Joomla. If you google ‘adsense Joomla’, there are quite a few plugins that can help you with that.
@Ivan, Gracias
@Jean – these are things I will definitely be looking at in the near future. Thanks for your suggestions!
@Rich, Candy – unfortunately some people seem to be having issues installing the component, across various versions of Joomla. The cause of this is not clear at the moment (in fact I have been completely unable to replicate this problem) but I would be very interested to hear if anyone knows of a cause or solution!
In the meantime, you could try one of the other installation options, like ‘install from URL’, rather than direct upload.
I was experiencing the same error mentioned above but was able to work around it.
I used the option to install from directory to help track down the problem. It appears it is trying to install from within the admin folder rather than the parent folder. Here are the steps I used.
1.Extract the archive into a directory (ie.. /tmp)
2.This will create a new directory in /tmp called com_advertising (/tmp/com_advertising)
3.If you try to install from this directory you still get the same error. To work around it do the following:
4.In /tmp/com_advertising you will find a directory called admin, go to that directory.
5.Create a new directory called admin. This will give you something like /tmp/com_advertising/admin/admin.
6.Move everything in this directory to the new admin directory
7.Go back to the parent admin directory (/tmp/com_advertising/admin)
8.Move the site directory into admin
9.Move advertising.xml into admin
10.Install using the install from directory option in Joomla 1.5 using /tmp/com_advertising as the directory to install from.
This should work. Hope I explained it clear and hope this helps to track down the problem. I don’t know enough about Joomla to know why this works or why the origianl way doesn’t.
Allen
Unfortunately once I got this working I discovered it wasn’t what I needed. I need all the functionality of the core banner component of Joomla with the addition of a start/end date.
Thanks anyway.
Very interesting article.. Thank you.
Mike @ http://cmscritic.com
Thank you very Allan for the solution..it worked perfectly…
Also the component is great, especially because it supports .swf format.
I was having the “admin\site” installation error for a component I’m developing and ended up here while searching for a solution.
In my case, the error was caused by the fact that the xml with the install instructions was on the admin folder. Moving it to the root folder of the component solved my problem.
Hope that helps.
Great work! Thanks for sharing!
Regards,
Gab
Very useful function, thank you much for sharing! Made my life easier
Cheers!
Hi
I am a very new user of Joomla 1.5. I need to drop a banner into an article, and am hoping this component will do it.
I have added the component, I can add a banner image and set it up, but how do I call this into my article?
Appreciate the patience upfront.
Malcolm
thx
but you can add option for opening add in new window or in old one
thx
pux
Great add, but is there a way to randomize the banner?
Thanks for all your hard work it is an excellent addition
nice component. I like it
Hi there,
. Best regards, bouncing elephant.
to fix the admin/site/index.html does not exists problem, remove the xml file from the admin folder. Hope this helps
The author, and you to order do not write?
Flash too ! That’s so cool. Thanks for the info. A Stumble for your efforts
Keeps getting this message when I´m trying to create a banner:
Fatal error: Call to undefined method TableAdvertising::getErrorMsg() in /homepages/31/d221539842/htdocs/www/WEBSITES/MUSICSTAGE_DEVEL/administrator/components/com_advertising/models/advertising.php on line 87
Anyone has an idea about that?
Is this Joomla 1.5 native or legacy only?
@ Tony, this is 1.5 native.
@Mattias, that’s a new one – could your installation of Joomla be corrupt?
@bouncingelephant, Guilherme, thanks for the solution to the installation woes, this shouldn’t re-occur now!
Hmm, don’t know. I have Joomla 1.5.3
Don’t think it´s corrupt. Is there anyway to find out if it is?
Great solution to a problem I was just having. I needed a banner management solution and it seems that this does just the trick. Thanks for providing us with such a useful component/module match.
Great solution indeed! We were looking for a way to manage our sales banners in a more efficient manner. Thanks for posting this! Can’t wait to see the results by offering a wider range of sale items.
Hi John
Great component, many thanks! The only method I’ve found of getting a swf file into Joomla!
Unfortunately I have a few hiccups on my test site. The Flash file published OK, but when I click, it opens a new window with target URL plus it reloads current window with target URL, giving me two open windows with same site!
I’d like it just to open the target in a new window/tab and leave existing site loaded.
Also, any method of monitoring click throughs?
Thanks again
Chris
Hello.
Good component, but… Is it possible to do the module with swfobject and to be SE friendly?
Thanks.
Just installed the component on one of my sites and it works great! Thanks a lot.
problem on line 87 can be solved in this way:
component search the table `jos_advertising`, but if you have your own table prefix (I have “PD_” and not the default “jos_”), component doesn’t find the table!
So go in PhpMyAdmin, SQL query and type:
“RENAME TABLE `jos_advertising` TO `(insert your own tables prefix)_advertising`,
and now it has to work!
thank you for that nice component and module.
for me there is few minor problems. if i have multiple banner positions like in header and second in footer and i want to show different banners, even different sizes, so what should i do? i make modules to both locations but i cant choose what banner i will show in that position. so in component, banners should have id-s and in module i can choose what banner i show in that module position.
i hope you can make these modifications
thank you
I’ve got this working! Its a really great component.
Hey great plugin just downloaded it and have been playing with it on the local side before going live. This has just saved me hours of coding my own plugin! THANKS!!!
-Victor
I would love to leave psoitive feed back but for some reason this component / module won’t recognise my image directory. While the module installs ok I just get a ‘no images’ message.
It does work great!! But as some others say, how can the clicks be monitored, in oder to report this to the advertiser?
And if i need any other banner with different size and place, how can i manage it?
Thnx a lot,
installed and it work great!!! thanks for the tips
Awesome component, works like a charm!
Will it run on Joomla 1.5 in legacy mode?
hello Alex,
though this Joomla! extension is not much complex but it will be more helping if you could explain the file structure and installation method for this Joomla! extension.
Ahsan @ http://ahsangill.wordpress.com
Hey John just wanted to drop you a line and thank you for all your hard work and excellent products!
Banners are not shown? What am i doing wrong? The module you see, but without the banners.
Thanks for your work, John!
It’s really good. And thanks for sharing.