new Ads plugin

Recently, Fintan Gallagher of MonaghanLife.ie asked me to rebuild his website, to freshen it up and add more social features to it.

We are still working through the list of wants, which included improvements in a number of our existing plugins. For example, we changed our Blog plugin so that comments are now Facebook-managed. Below this article, you see that you can comment on the article, and if you are logged into Facebook, you get the option to show your comment to your friends.

As part of the requirements, we also needed to create a new plugin, Ads.

The existing site had an Ads plugin, but it was a little restricted: ads are created by the website administrator, they record simply the total number of views and clicks, and there is no client login so the client can view stats for themselves.

The new Ad plugin has the following features:

1. Clients can log in and purchase ads for themselves
2. The administrator can add blocks of ads to any page, saying what type, and how many of that type, should appear. This allows you to use a different set of ads on the front page, for example.
3. Ads are assigned specific widths and heights, and images uploaded by the client are automatically resized to the appropriate size.
4. Stats are recorded not only of the total number of clicks and views, but the day as well, which lets us display graphs showing when the clicks or views happened.
5. Because we now can create different ad types, we can also charge clients different amounts depending on where in the site the ads are displayed.
6. Clients can log in and view the statistics of their ads for themselves.

One of the things I love about creating new plugins is that each one of them makes it so much easier to create a new set of websites. The Ads plugin makes it possible for owners of popular websites to make some easy money without having to spend time on it themselves - just let your clients purchase and manage their own ad slots, and sit back and watch!