UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Programming PHP and Server-side Scripting Language to use for an advertising script.

Hey folks,

So we are planning to implement an advertising scheme. An example of what we want to do can be seen on the website http://www.outdoorreview.com called Hot Deals, which is found in the middle of the page. Basically they have it setup so it randomly picks an advertiser and then picks one of their products to showcase, doing three at a time on the front page.

I want to do the same thing on our website using the sidebar, but only doing it on the front of the message board and the active topics, not on the threads itself.

My problem is I don't which language to use because I'm using the PHP accelerator. Unless I use an inline frame I can't use Perl on the PHP pages, and it is not clear to me that I can use PHP on the CGI generated pages. I recall that my host has PHP configured that it can execute any page extension. Is this possible or am mistaken? I could use Javascript but I'm more proficient at PHP and I'm not sure Javascript is best suited for something like this. So what do you experts think?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Jon

it looks like it only picks ramdomly selected 3 products... Does not look like a comlex script...

If your host supports SSI, you can write it in Perl and execute in the page, or you can call a php script with ssi...

Anyway, if you are using the php acc. you can just use php I believe, but since this question is related with ubb, CC or some other ubb mod writer can say anything better maybe...

Also, you can always use js to include such things... Just configure you script's output, so that it will print (document.write "blah"

Make you life easy...

http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpadsnew/

Thanks for the responses.

I've checked out phpadsnew before, but I don't think it will work for what I want to do. I want to have text along with the pictures. Again what I'm going to write is really quite simple I just was unsure about the languages and such. SSI looks like the way to go, I'll check it out.

I'm going to do this in PHP/MySQL. It will have an interface for the retailers to add and remove their advertisments, probably with some sort of reporting option. I'm sure someone here will find use in this, so when I'm done I'll release to the community, least I can do for all the hacks we use.

Thanks, Jon

Your best bet would PROBABLY be to start out with an existing base... that PHP ads package is great. It should be pretty easy to modify it to fit your needs (or hire someone to modify it to fit your needs)

Charles, I'll check out that package and see if I can get it to do what I want. Thanks.

I've spent some time trying to find out some information about the SSI and have a few questions about it. When you use SSI with cgi it sounds like you have to use the .shtml extension, is this true? Now embedding the PHP in the php generated pages shouldn't be a problem. But how do I set this up for the cgi generated pages? I've read that you put something in your .htaccess file specifying which extensions get fired through the PHP interpreter. So I could put that all .cgi would go through PHP. Now for this to work the .cgi would have to be generated first and then the output goes through PHP. If this is indeed how you do this what kind of performance hit am I going to take if all the .cgi generated on my page has to go through PHP?

Basically I'm stupid and need some help. Thanks again!

You can't parse SSI in CGI output most of the time. Most banner ad solutions use a Javascript that the users pull in in order to display the ads... IIRC, this is an option in the PHP ad package, but I don't recall at the moment.