phpAdsNew 2 Beta 7 almost finished

Its been over four months since the last beta version of phpAdsNew 2.0.

First of all, Beta 6.1 was a step in the right direction and added a lot of new features. After the release of Beta 6.1 we decided to make one last beta version before the final release. It was our intention to release it pretty quickly after Beta 6.1, but during the development we decided to postpone the release because we really wanted to add some essential features.

If you looked at the development builds which were released after Beta 6.1, you probably know most of the new features already. I havent got the time to describe all the additions, but the most important are listed below.

After the release of Beta 6.1 we started working on an automatic installer and updater for phpAdsNew. In addition to this we also created the ability to fully configure phpAdsNew right from the administrator interface.

Weve added better support for Flash banners, and I am glad to tell you phpAdsNew now fully supports Flash banners which are prepared according to the MFAA guidelines. Banners, which are created by these guidelines, are not only compatible with phpAdsNew, but can be used by almost any professional ad server solution, such as DoubleClick DART, Engage and many more.

In addition to the MFAA support, we also created a unique feature which allows you to use Flash banners with hard-coded links, and still have the ability to track AdClicks. Basically phpAdsNew includes a small Flash editor, which allows you to convert the hard-coded links.

Perhaps the most important change is the introduction of campaign priorities. Beta 7 will allow you to specify for each high priority campaign how many impressions must be served daily. PhpAdsNew will check every hour if the impressions are on schedule and will compensate if necessary. Low priority campaigns work just like how campaigns worked in previous versions; you can use the weight to influence how many times its banners are shown.

Beta 6.1 introduced zones. Beta 7 brings you publishers. If you want to server banners for more than one website you will like this feature. You can create a publisher for each website and define zones which belong to a publisher.

Weve also revamped the statistics, which are now much, much more detailed. Not only did we update the existing statistics, but we also added new statistics for publishers and zones. You can see how many impressions each publisher and zone is generating and which banners were shown inside a zone.

The last thing I wanted to tell you about is something Ive been working on for a long time. Beta 7 will include a completely rewritten and redesigned manual. It will be available as a separate download in PDF format. The manual is currently split into two different guides, one for installing and configuration, and the other one is a user guide, which are in total more than 130 pages.

Oh.. Just one more thing: Weve also spent quite a bit of time on optimizing. Weve reduced the number of lines of code that needed to be executed during banner delivery by half. In addition to this, we rewrote a lot of the queries needed to fetch the statistics, which should result in a big improvement of the speed of the administrator interface.

Its now four months since the release of Beta 6.1 and most of the things we set out for Beta 7 are finished. Beta 7 isnt quite finished yet, but it will be very soon. If everything goes according to plan it should be available in the next 14 days. In the mean time weve created another development release, which should include 95% of all the features of Beta 7. The development build should be available shortly.