phpAdsNew 2 beta 6 released

It took over 4 months, but beta 6 is finally ready. There are a lot of improvements and a lot of new features. It took a while, but I think beta 6 will be a big improvement over older versions.

Zones
Traditionally phpAdsNew needed to be configured in the invocation code. If you wanted to change which banner was displayed on a certain location you needed to edit the invocation code. Although this approach can be very powerful it is a bit cumbersome to maintain. Beta 6 introduces zones. Instead of using the invocation code to decide which banner will be shown, you can use a zone in the invocation code and determine which banners will be shown for each zone in the admin interface. Although this approach is a bit less powerful, it will be a great addition for those who dont need all the extra power.

Flash
Using Flash banners used to be a problem, you had to upload the .swf file to the web server manually, create a new HTML banner and add the HTML code needed to display the banner. From now on phpAdsNew will support Flash banners transparently. You can use Banner stored in SQL or Banner stored on webserver, just like you would if you were adding a .gif or .jpg banner, and simply select the .swf file you want to use.
phpAdsNew will make sure the banner is stored correctly and will take care of the correct HTML code needed to display the banner.

P3P
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 introduced P3P privacy policies. Although this is a big improvement for cookie management, it did cause some problem for phpAdsNew. Beta 6 will have full support for P3P policies in order to make sure cookies from phpAdsNew arent blocked. You can configure which compact policies are sent to the browser in the configuration file.

Display limitations
Previous versions had a feature called ACLs. Using ACLs you were able to target banners to specific users, countries and browsers. For Beta 6 we have completely rewritten the ACLs and from now on it is called Display limitations. We have added the ability to filter on language, added boolean operators and made it much easier to use.

HTML banners
HTML banners were always a bit problematic. We always modified the supplied HTML code in order to automatically log clicks. However didnt work for forms and caused some problems with certain banner networks. From now on you can decide whether you want to automatically change the supplied HTML or not. If you do want to automatically change the supplied HTML it will work for both normal links and forms. Another new ability is to embed PHP code inside the HTML banner. This feature is turned off by default, but if you want to try it out, you can turn it on in the configuration file.

These are just a selection of all the new features and changes. We spend a lot of time improving existing features, fixing bugs and adding those little things that should make it easier to use phpAdsNew. In addition to this we also reviewed the security of phpAdsNew and fixed some potential problems. There are just too many changes to list here, but if you want to know exactly what was changed, please take a look at the Changelog.

I also want to take this opportunity to welcome Stefan (dandra) to the development team. Stefan will be working on several new features and already has been a great help in improving phpAdsNew. Furthermore I would like to thank all translators who have been helping us improve the quality of the language files. Almost all supported languages are up to date and we added 6 new supported languages: Norwegian, Swedish, Chinese, Turkish, Danish and Indonesian.

Niels Leenheer
niels@creatype.nl