johnmccollum.co.uk

I’ve received a surprising number of questions and comments from users regarding my Easy Ad Banner component and module for Joomla.

One user asked whether he should be using the module or component to display his banners - good question! For the banner system I’ve developed, the module will display one random banner on each page load. (And will look at the date to pull a current one.) The component will load every valid banner onto the page, in a random order.

A component typically puts content in the main body of the page. You’ll create a link from the menu to the component, and the contents of this component will appear when you click the menu. In our case, the component also creates the admin interface, so you will always need to use the component.

A module, on the other hand, typically sits on every page (although you can choose what pages it will appear on.) While components appear in the main body of the page, modules will typically sit in the sidebar, the header, or the footer of the page. You can’t create a menu link to a module, the way you could with a component.

So you have the following decision to make:

1) “I want the advert(s) to appear in the main body of the page and possibly create a menu link to it.”

You should download only the component. Once it is installed, sign in to the admin area, and go to Components->Advertising. Add new banner(s) as appropriate. Once that’s done, create a menu item in the usual way. The type of link should be ‘advertising->default layout’. Save your menu item, and you should now be able to see the page.

2) “I want the banner to appear on every page, or in an area of the page that is NOT the main content area.”

Follow the steps above, but don’t create a menu item. Install the module. Go to Extensions->module manager, then click on the cross next to ‘random banners’ to enable it. Click on the words ‘Random Banners’ to edit the settings of the module. From here, you can change some of the settings - which pages the module appears in, the module position (left, right, top etc) the CSS class, the title of the module, and more. As long as you’ve activated it, the module should appear in the desired position.

Hopefully this basic information will help some of you out a little bit. You can download the module and component here.

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!