Wp Adcenter has been launched to the public. This is not really a review of wp Adcenter but more of my own personal experience of using it on a live site. It’s not perfect but it pretty close to being a very usable advertising management plugin for WordPress. There’s just a few little glitches to iron out but it’s advanced enough and stable enough for me to put it live on my Wildlfie News web site.
It’s all very well running adverts for third party ad management companies – and there’s plenty of WordPress plug-ins for you to make it easy – but it’s only when you start selling advertising directly to advertisers that you will make any real money from you blog.
Easy to use WordPress advertising manager.
Until the release of the wp-adcenter plugin if you wanted an easy way to display advertsing with a plugin you were pretty much restricted to time based adverts – not a popular format for web advertisers. If you were handy with a bit of programming and did not mind having a seperate advertising manager then the A.M.Y offered a great option of being able to put in place time based, impression based or click based programmes to sell – but there was no payment option with it.
Stable WordPress advertising plugin with a few minor issues.
The nice thing about wp-adcenter is that for a small price you can buy a simple to install adversing management system that lets you sell on a time based or impression based model. There is currently not the ability to sell on a per click basis with this plugin.
The two things that really stand out for me is that;
- You install through your WordPress admin panel, so it really is a simple poit and click install.
- It’s integrated into the Paypal payment system so advertisers can pay as they order the advertising slot.
I’ve been looking for a simple and straightforward advertising manager since I moved the wildlife News web site over to WordPress a couple of years ago. This is the best solution so far.
There are some glitches that need to be worked on – but I don’t think they will be too major to solve.
The first problem I cam across was that even though I could set the currency to GBP and it gets carried across OK to Paypal on the advertisers page it still displayed as the default USD currency. This is because the form is hardcoded to the currency rather than calling the variable. not a prblem though it’s easy dealt with by opening up the userForm.php file and changing the USD on lines 67, 128 and 187 to your own currency. You can also change the currency a bit to suit your own site. I moved the currency to in front and changed to the £ rather than using GBP for my site. I suppose if I was a purist I would change the USD to a call to the currency variable but I’m not.
The next problem I came across was that jpg images uploaded as an advertiser was not being validated but gif were. As an advertising admin you can upload jpg images through the admin panel but advertisers can not when booking an ad. This issue is restricted to IE8 (not sure about IE9) other browsers don’t seem to be affected.
This needs a bit of further investigation. Initially I though it was the dreaded jquery 1.7 / internet explorer problems. If this is the case then a simple downgrade to jquery 1.5 or upgrade to jquery 1.9 should deal with the issue. But I’m not so sure it is as there’s not a problem uploading gifs. also you can upload jpgs through the admin panel so either the admin is not covered by the jquery validation script or there’s simply a missing image suffix code. I’ll do a search of the code when I have chance and post any solution here later.
The third and final problem I have with the management is that while it will take Google adsense javascript (it’s the only javascript code I’ve tested so far) the admin panel really don’t like it.
WordPress advertising manager with Paypal.
Your adsense ads will show in the ad zone but in the banner management you may find a few problems that can make it difficult to manage banners.
Apart from those three minor bugs – 1 of which is easy to deal with yourself and the two others not a major obstacle to overcome – this is a great plugin for those who are looking at moving into running their own on-line advertising accounts.
It’s flexible and easy to use. You can set up ad zones with different size banners, you can set up your own advertising prices and campaigns. Displaying the ads is easy either by using the sidebar widgets, template tags and even short codes.
As I say there are a few minor issues but it is stable enough for me to launch it on a live site. It is a new plugin and I’m not too sure about the level of support that you get – but it’s affordable and easy to use.
Go to wp adcenter.
