The road ahead

History

Let's start with some history first. Back in 1999, Tobias Ratschiller released version 0.9 of phpAds. In the next year, he added logs of features, fixed lots of bugs and made phpAds a must for the small sites using php. In May 2000, he released version 1.4.0, which was quite stable but also had quite a few annoying bugs. We haven't heard from Tobias ever since. So in September, I took the GPL'ed code and started phpAdsNew, releasing version 1.4.9 on September 14. It has since grown to become one of the top 5 projects in terms of activity on SourceForge.
In February, I was forced to temporarily hand over the administration of the project to Phil Hord due to busy schedule. However, I'll be back very soon... working on...

phpAdsPro

phpAdsPro, the new phpAds(New), which will be developed in the next few months, will be a complete rewrite of the system.
During development of phpAds(New), tons of code was added that slowed the system down. Also, the base of phpAds was designed for small sites, not for sites that get millions of bannerviews every day. In short, phpAds lacks a decent design and is in fact a pile of code thrown together. What we'll do in phpAdsPro is completely start from scratch. We won't look at any code of phpAds(New) and will base ourselves on some techniques I've recently learned to use, which will make things a lot faster and more structurized.
OK, where's the catch ? It might not run on php3, although it's too early to say, as development hasn't started yet. But because php4 offers several exciting features that will speed up phpAdsPro, we might have to drop php3 support. For the php3 users, there's probably still going to be some bug fixing on phpAdsNew, but development will be limited to the real necessary.

The design

phpAdsPro will be built around a central core, which will make it easier to hook up additional features. This central core will be the first thing to be written and I will take this task at hand. Once the core is somewhat complete, I will put it on CVS for other developers to comment on. This process will take several weeks during which there may be several major changes. After we all agree on the core, we'll work out a detailed development strategy and begin the actual development of the advertising system.

Things everyone wants or likes

- phpAdsPro will be database independent. Adding a new database will consist of writing a few lines of code.
- Compiled ACL's will be looked at... this might be a whole lot more efficient than the current system (thanks for the tip, Phil)
- several ways to generate statistics (real-time or in cron-jobs), depending on how many adviews you get every day, etc.
- advertising campaigns (with seperate statistics)
- ability to run phpAdsPro on several sites (create an "advertising server"), with seperate statistics)

When ?

The big question : when will we start developing and when will it be ready ? Well... development on the core will begin in June or July. This should take no more than about 1 month, so in August we'll be starting development on the rest of phpAdsPro. Expect the first beta releases to appear in October and some stable release by the end of December or January. Yes, that's still a long time to wait, but hey... there's phpAdsNew for now !