Banner

A banner is a block of promotional content, displayed at a predefined place on one or more of your web pages. Zoglair has native support for banners and offers a rather extensive list of options for their management.

Banners are displayed through the banner clip, with the following syntax:

banner/id - or - banner/position[/count]

The first syntax displays the banner with the specified row ID. The second syntax displays up to count banners (1 if no count entered) who are qualified for the specified position. See below for information about banner positions.

The banner form contains the following fields:

[Main]

• Title
  A descriptive title.
• Type
  The banner's type:
  • fixed
    The banner is a fixed image, taken from the Upload table. Its ID is specified in the “Image” field, below.
  • auto
    The banner uses the template entered in the “Code” tab, to display content loaded from “Auto Table”, using “Auto Filter”.
  • code
    The banner is whatever is entered in the “Code” tab.
• Auto Table
  If the banner type is “auto”, then you must select a table which will provide the banner content (usually an image, but can be anything). For example, you may want to display images from your articles. The program will load one random row from this table, each time the particular banner is used.
• Auto Filter
  You may (optionally) specify a filter, to limit the eligible rows selected from the previous table. To have a better understanding of how this works, here is the code that the program uses:
     $SET = $zDbms->select($ROW['autoTable'],array(
   'where'=>$ROW['autoFilter'],'order'=>'RAND()','limit'=>1);
  As you see, “Auto Filter” is used verbatim, so you have to be extra careful about it! It is also worth mentioning that due to the RAND() function being extremely slow, it is a good idea to limit the set by making use of a proper “Auto Filter”. Needless to say, this requires some basic SQL and zoglair database schema knowledge.
• User ID
  Not currently used.
• Image
  The image ID, in case of a “fixed” banner.
• Width
  The banner's total width (in pixels).
• Height
  The banner's total height (in pixels).
• Position
  An arbitrary string, of your own format, in which you specify banner positions. An asterisk (*) denotes that this banner is eligible to any position.
• Page
  A list of pages (link nodes) to which this banner can be displayed. An asterisk (*) denotes that this banner is eligible to all pages.
• Link
  The URL this banner will be linked to. This is only applicable to non-flash banners.
• Copies
  This is used for increasing the display probability of a particular banner, in a rotation scheme. Suppose, for example, there are 6 banners eligible to a certain position of a certain page at any time. Since there is only one spot available, the program must rotate them so that each banner gets an equal number of impressions (views). If one of those 6 banners has a “Copies” set to 1, then 7 banners will be used in rotation (the 2 of them being the same), and so on.

[Terms]

• Paid Per
  How the banner is paid.
• Valid Until
  The date when the banner expires.
• Debit
• Credit
  Relative amounts.
• Views
• Clicks
  Relative statistics.

[Code]

Free-form HTML code for non-fixed banners (see above).