A Place For Stephen

I’ve been looking for a php script which would allow me to show all sorts of random advertisements on my blog pages.

Something like the FREE OpenAds php software is pretty damn comprehensive and is an excellent adserver, but it’s a bit over the top for the needs of us less humble bloggers.

And that’s where WPAds comes in…

WPAds is a Wordpress plugin for showing and rotating ads in your blog.

You can set up any sorts of ads using HTML code - and that includes the “normal” types of image banner ads as well as your Google Adsense ads.

The only thing it doesn’t do at all is click tracking… so while you can see how many exposures each ad has had, you won’t have any idea how many clicks you’ve had.

So… download, unzip, install and activate the plugin, and then from your Wordpress/Options/ WPAds menu, start adding ad banners…

All you have to do is define the “zones” you want, place the ads in each zone, and put some simple code on your php pages and/or posts, where you want those ads to appear.

And then… WPAds will serve your ads randomly.

BIG TIP Remember, all ads in the same zone should all be the same size!!! It’ll make life easier for you if you don’t mix them up.

Oh… I should ALSO add… (added 14th November 2007)

A plugin like this is great for showing a random selection of ads in one zone. If you’ve got half a dozen different ads you want to select from to display in your header for example, then by all means, use this plugin.

BUT - if you ONLY want to show the SAME ad all the time - then DON’T use it! It is simpler to put the HTML code directly into your template file, instead of calling the PHP routine to select the one ad all the time.

It’s one less thing your server has to do to create the page, so it will reduce the load and speed up the page load (a little).

I’ll do another post shortly on how you can make some simple modifications to your template which also help reduce the work your server has to do…

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