IP.Nexus has an advertisements feature, allowing administrators to display advertisements on their community and sell advertising space to third parties.
We've spent some time going over some of the suggestions we've received for the advertisements system and have made the following enhancements for IP.Nexus 1.1.
Start/End Time
Advertisements can now be specified with start and end times for time-specific campaigns.
Advertisement Packages: Expire by length
In hand with the option to set a start/end time, you can now specify that purchased advertisements last a certain length of time, opposed to a number of clicks or impressions.
Advertisement Package Descriptions
You can now specify a description for advertisement packages which will display on the purchase screen.
Admin Image Upload
Currently, when an administrator adds an advertisement they must specify a URL to an image (or HTML code).
As of Nexus 1.1, administrators will see an option to upload an image too.
Circulation Mode
In IP.Nexus 1.0, if there is more than one advertisement per location, a random advertisement is selected from the pool.
In IP.Nexus 1.1, we've added a setting which allows you to continue using this behaviour, or to always use the most recently added advertisement. This is useful if you want to have a generic advertisement set up by the administrator but allow purchased advertisements to override that for their duration.
Maximum Number of Advertisements
You may only want one advertisement in each location at a time, so that advertisements don't circulate at all. In IP.Nexus 1.1, we've added a setting allowing you to specify the maximum number of advertisements per location.
Administrators of course can oevrride this, but if there is the specified number of advertisements in a given location, users will not be able to purchase advertisement packages which add advertisements to that location.
Alignment
We've added a new setting which allows you to choose how to align your advertisements.
Size Restrictions
You can now specify in an advertisement package the maximum size for advertisements created by that package.
External Access
Currently, IP.Nexus displays advertisements in pre-set locations on your community. As of IP.Nexus 1.1, you can include advertisements in other areas of your skin, in IP.Content blocks and even in external pages and applications outside of IP.Board.
To place an advertisement in a template or IP.Content block, you can simply use the tag:
{parse advertisement="1"}
The tag can take either the ID number for the advertisement to display, or the key for the location, which will use IP.Nexus' normal logic for fetching the advertisement. For example, using this tag:
{parse advertisement="ad_code_board_index_header"}
Would display whatever advertisement is configured to show in the board index header - if more than one is configured, Nexus will either pick a random one, or the most recent one (as per the circulation setting described above).
To place an advertisement on an external site, you can call a new REST API which will out put the contents - the file is located at:
http://www.yoursite.com/interface/advertisements.php
You simply need to pass a single variable in the query string which is the same as the parse tag above (ID number or location key).
For example, you might use something like this to add your advertisement to a website outside of IP.Board:
<?php echo file_get_contents( "http://localhost/ipbdev/interface/advertisements.php?ad_code_global_header" );
If you have more in-depth feedback or ideas please use our feedback forum so your suggestions can be given proper attention. Otherwise, feel free to comment on this entry below.