phpAdsNew 2 RC 1 released

After a couple of false starts, the first release candidate of phpAdsNew 2 is released. The last couple of weeks the release was delayed a couple of times because of time constraints and bug-fixes and retests.

Compared to Beta 7 there are some great new features and some big changes. For a complete list please see the Changelog, but the most important I will mention below.

Geotargeting
Thanks to both MaxMind and IP2Country we now offer support for geotargeting in phpAdsNew. It is based on the existing delivery limitations and can be a big help in targeting banners to the right audience. To enable this feature you will need a geotargeting database which can be bought from our own website. Also if you want to try out this feature a free version of the GeoIP database courtesy of MaxMind can be downloaded from our website.

Delivery caching
One big change in the delivery engine was a rewrite of the zone cache mechanism. After the responses to an experimental development build, which we created to test this, we decided to include this feature in RC 1. The new delivery cache will work for both direct selection and zone and includes support for multiple types of caching. Just like before the default type is using the database, be we also offer caching in files for a major speedup and caching in shared memory using the shmop or sysvshm extension (experimental).

Text ads
One of the first things we added after Beta 7 was release was TextAds which are known from Google. Text ads are a low-profile, but highly effective way to advertise.

Compatibility
When Beta 7 was released we had a big problem with compatibility. PHP 4.2 which was released sometime before Beta 7 changed the default settings of the register_globals configuration variable. The result of this was that phpAdsNew wasnt compatible anymore with the default settings of PHP 4.2. Making phpAdsNew compatible with the new default settings was a lot of work because it had an impact on almost every file. Apart from this issue we also worked hard on making phpAdsNew more compatible with IIS, the PHP CGI SAPI, SSL and other PHP configuration settings.