We have been using custom ad locations to place banners next to each other in a custom block on the top of the forum and custom css to make them fluid and not appear on top of each other, we are in contract with our advertisers that pay 750USD yearly for one of the three banners that display simultaneously at the top of the site. None of the default ad locations are a good substitute for this.

We have also used custom ad locations to stack several ads on top of each other in the sidebar and were just about to contact potential advertisers for spots there. This is now not possible either, severely hurting our potential for funding the site. And well, with no income, Invision Power will have one less customer.

Can this be solved?

How much of the advertisement system were you using? Did you take advantage of the views, clicks, etc...? If not, in version 5, you can still use the theme system to put in advertising banners in places which have theme hooks., they just will be outside of the advertisement system.

We used the advertisement system for everything, to be able to track impressions, clicks, specify start and end dates and so on.

The most important thing of course is to be able to show the ads in the way the advertisers have paid for, but losing all the functionality of the advertisement system is a letdown for sure.

Edited February 17Feb 17 by kammeret.no

@Esther E. can advise, but we're always open to feedback.

You can still add custom ad locations but can't edit the templates directly to include them.

You need to make an application, use the core/AdvertisementLocations extension to define new locations, and add template hooks for those locations:

It's a bit of a roundabout way compared to v4, but it's still possible. Of course, it will work only if the template hook points are available for the locations you need. 🤷‍♂️

An application shouldn't be necessary in this case.

You can create the advertisements the same way as you did before. Then you have 2 choices:

1. Use the new "Advertisement" widget in the Page Editor to drop the ad anywhere you like.
   
   

2. Create a custom block under in the ACP under Pages -> Blocks. Then you can create a custom template to drop that block in a particular hook point using the same {block="my_custom_block"} that you used in v4.

Thanks, I'll look into it.