New Joomla! banner component
I was recently working on a Joomla! site which required a fairly unusual banner management system. The spec was that the user would be able to enter a list of banners, links, start dates and expiry dates, and that these banners would be displayed in a random order in the main content area. The component will accept all major image formats, and flash movie files. (.swf)
I wasted quite a bit of time trying to mold other components to my needs, but I could have saved myself some time if I had just written my own!
Here we are, then; the result of my labour.
This component requires Joomla 1.5 or later.
LICENSE + DISCLAIMER:Copyright 2008 John McCollum. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
By downloading this component, you are indicating your acceptance of the terms above. Please make sure you back up your files and database before installing this component.
Click here to download the component!
EDIT - by popular demand, I’ve written a simple module to interact with this component. It simply loads a random image or .swf into a module position, based on dates supplied by the user. Note - you must download the component to use the module, although you can use the component on its own!
Click here to download the module!
Tags: advertising, banners, CMS, content management systems, Joomla
July 10th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Hi
nice work hope you will put this up on the joomla directory as well!
rgds
July 12th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Hey Darb,
Thanks for all your encouragement! I’ve taken your advice and notified the JED, hopefully it should be listed there soon.
John
July 19th, 2008 at 7:46 am
Good to see that you have put it up on JED!
Thanks from the Joomla community!
rgds
July 20th, 2008 at 11:52 am
[...] Download [...]
July 20th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
[...] I’ve written a companion module for my Joomla advertising component. [...]
July 23rd, 2008 at 9:13 pm
[...] I’ve received a surprising number of questions and comments from users regarding my Easy Ad Banner component and module for Joomla. [...]
July 31st, 2008 at 6:18 pm
component will not install. keep getting this:
\install_48920111a7d8d\com_advertising\admin\site\index.html’ does not exist
by the way, install_48920111a7d8d\ does not exist.
module installed fine.
July 31st, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Hi Candy, thanks for the feedback. Sorry to hear about your problem - if you could email at john AT johnmccollum.co.uk, I’ll do what I can to help.
August 4th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Installed component & module - works great!
It would be cool to set the bg-color for flash and add some custom flashvars because most banners have clicktags inside, so the vars for this have to be send to the flashmovie. And an option for opening a new window (”_blank”) when clicking the banner would be nice, too.
Keep on your good work & thanks a lot!
August 5th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Hi I get this error message install_48984972565f3/com_advertising/admin/site/index.html’ does not exist is this because I run Joomla 1.5.3?
August 7th, 2008 at 6:00 am
Excelente trabajo todo perfecto, gracias.
August 8th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
I noticed that you have Google adwords…did you use your component/module to set that up? If so, how?
August 8th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
@Calvin - no, this site doesn’t use Joomla. If you google ‘adsense Joomla’, there are quite a few plugins that can help you with that.
@Ivan, Gracias
@Jean - these are things I will definitely be looking at in the near future. Thanks for your suggestions!
@Rich, Candy - unfortunately some people seem to be having issues installing the component, across various versions of Joomla. The cause of this is not clear at the moment (in fact I have been completely unable to replicate this problem) but I would be very interested to hear if anyone knows of a cause or solution!
In the meantime, you could try one of the other installation options, like ‘install from URL’, rather than direct upload.
August 8th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
I was experiencing the same error mentioned above but was able to work around it.
I used the option to install from directory to help track down the problem. It appears it is trying to install from within the admin folder rather than the parent folder. Here are the steps I used.
1.Extract the archive into a directory (ie.. /tmp)
2.This will create a new directory in /tmp called com_advertising (/tmp/com_advertising)
3.If you try to install from this directory you still get the same error. To work around it do the following:
4.In /tmp/com_advertising you will find a directory called admin, go to that directory.
5.Create a new directory called admin. This will give you something like /tmp/com_advertising/admin/admin.
6.Move everything in this directory to the new admin directory
7.Go back to the parent admin directory (/tmp/com_advertising/admin)
8.Move the site directory into admin
9.Move advertising.xml into admin
10.Install using the install from directory option in Joomla 1.5 using /tmp/com_advertising as the directory to install from.
This should work. Hope I explained it clear and hope this helps to track down the problem. I don’t know enough about Joomla to know why this works or why the origianl way doesn’t.
Allen
August 8th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Unfortunately once I got this working I discovered it wasn’t what I needed. I need all the functionality of the core banner component of Joomla with the addition of a start/end date.
Thanks anyway.
September 14th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Very interesting article.. Thank you.
Mike @ http://cmscritic.com
September 17th, 2008 at 6:54 am
Thank you very Allan for the solution..it worked perfectly…
Also the component is great, especially because it supports .swf format.
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:15 pm
I was having the “admin\site” installation error for a component I’m developing and ended up here while searching for a solution.
In my case, the error was caused by the fact that the xml with the install instructions was on the admin folder. Moving it to the root folder of the component solved my problem.
Hope that helps.
September 28th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Great work! Thanks for sharing!
Regards,
Gab
September 29th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Very useful function, thank you much for sharing! Made my life easier
Cheers!
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:30 am
Hi
I am a very new user of Joomla 1.5. I need to drop a banner into an article, and am hoping this component will do it.
I have added the component, I can add a banner image and set it up, but how do I call this into my article?
Appreciate the patience upfront.
Malcolm
October 13th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
thx
but you can add option for opening add in new window or in old one
thx
pux
October 27th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Great add, but is there a way to randomize the banner?
October 27th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
Thanks for all your hard work it is an excellent addition
November 1st, 2008 at 3:20 pm
nice component. I like it
November 11th, 2008 at 7:26 am
Hi there,
to fix the admin/site/index.html does not exists problem, remove the xml file from the admin folder. Hope this helps ;). Best regards, bouncing elephant.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:20 am
The author, and you to order do not write?
November 20th, 2008 at 6:33 am
Flash too ! That’s so cool. Thanks for the info. A Stumble for your efforts
November 27th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Keeps getting this message when I´m trying to create a banner:
Fatal error: Call to undefined method TableAdvertising::getErrorMsg() in /homepages/31/d221539842/htdocs/www/WEBSITES/MUSICSTAGE_DEVEL/administrator/components/com_advertising/models/advertising.php on line 87
Anyone has an idea about that?
November 28th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Is this Joomla 1.5 native or legacy only?
November 28th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
@ Tony, this is 1.5 native.
@Mattias, that’s a new one - could your installation of Joomla be corrupt?
@bouncingelephant, Guilherme, thanks for the solution to the installation woes, this shouldn’t re-occur now!
November 29th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Hmm, don’t know. I have Joomla 1.5.3
Don’t think it´s corrupt. Is there anyway to find out if it is?
December 2nd, 2008 at 11:58 pm
Great solution to a problem I was just having. I needed a banner management solution and it seems that this does just the trick. Thanks for providing us with such a useful component/module match.
December 9th, 2008 at 12:39 am
Thanks for sharing your work! I will try this out on a test site!
December 11th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Great solution indeed! We were looking for a way to manage our sales banners in a more efficient manner. Thanks for posting this! Can’t wait to see the results by offering a wider range of sale items.
December 13th, 2008 at 7:13 am
Hi John
Great component, many thanks! The only method I’ve found of getting a swf file into Joomla!
Unfortunately I have a few hiccups on my test site. The Flash file published OK, but when I click, it opens a new window with target URL plus it reloads current window with target URL, giving me two open windows with same site!
I’d like it just to open the target in a new window/tab and leave existing site loaded.
Also, any method of monitoring click throughs?
Thanks again
Chris
December 16th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Hello.
Good component, but… Is it possible to do the module with swfobject and to be SE friendly?
Thanks.
December 30th, 2008 at 2:44 am
Just installed the component on one of my sites and it works great! Thanks a lot.