Ads Module for Drupal 6.x

Submitted by administrator on Fri, 10/03/2008 - 19:43

Drupal Development

What is it?

Ok, so I'm working on a module to let users on Bottleweb display advertisements on their own Blogs. I now have a development version up and running, which has the following features:

Users can chose from a list of advertisers (they will need to create their own account with that ad provider) and can chose as many advertisers as they want to use
Each ad zone (currently left sidebar, right sidebar, header and footer) can be activated by the user, and ads can be displayed from any ad provider in each zone
Ads will be displayed on any page created by the user, currently including any forum page or blog page created by that user. Also, the container page for any forum will display the ads of the last person who posted into a forum in that container. I figured this would encourage forum participation, I may keep/remove this feature in the future depending on feedback
Currently only Google Adsense is supported, but I will have more coming shortly

Upcoming features

administrators can choose replace user ads with their own ads for a certain percentage of impressions (revenue sharing)
administrators can enable a "default" ad, which displays on every page if the current page owner has not created their own ads
I also intend to create more ad zones, such as between comments.
More customisation, such as: control over where ads are displayed by users, allow admin to decide whether users have the option of controlling how much of their ad time is donated to admin, whether or not administrator ads should be displayed on pages where users do not have their own ads, etc.
Statistics, once I learn some javascript... (If you know how to track clicks and have a bit of spare time let me know!)

Some help is always appreciated

Ok I have a pre dev version up and running which I would like people to test. I currently have only the Google Adsense template set up, so to test the functionality of several advertisers I have added a fake advertiser called 'bottleweb', just to see everything actually works with more than one advertiser option. Please give it a go and let me know what you think. Now that this small alpha version runs on my setup, I will start working on some tutorials and will also ad Adbrite as a supported advertiser. But I can't do this all on my own guys if you have some time to test this module please do so and let me know how it goes.

Below this post you will see the latest version of the module. Stay tuned for tutorials and a help file. If you want to see a demo without doing any installing yourself, I have created a test user with the username test_user and the password password. Just log in and click on 'Ads module settings', to see what it looks like just check out the blog created with this user here: http://www.bottleweb.org/test-user/test-user-drupal-ads-module-blog and the forum entry here: http://www.bottleweb.org/internet/drupal-development/test-user-forum-topic

Please don't change any of the ad settings. If you want to change the settings please create your own account. Most importantly, give feedback. I have developed this module so far based on what I would want, but I really need to get some perspective so if you have any comments please post them.