Sometimes everything just falls into place.
I have been on a business trip and it involved some hours waiting on the airport for my flight - so I just took up some papers and a pencil and starting scetching on how I wanted textads to be integrated into AdMentor PRO. I soon came up with the idea(s) that
- targetting for a textad should be the same mechanism as for a "usual" ad. I.e zoning, max clicks, max impressions, random/even distribution as well as the new advanced filtering such as IP/country filter, browser etc
- you should then "enable" textads for a certain adposition
- different templates could be used - you just create a xml/html template and place it into the /textadtemplate/ directory and the system picks it up and makes it available for usage
- a textad is a banner of type "Textad" so now you can add such an ad as well
- for each textad you can set click url, a header and description
The good thing about this scheme is that it is doesn't need you to do any changes to the admentor call code you already have in all your webpages.
You just create some text ads, enable it for an adposition and it will be rotate all banners (regular and textads) for the current zone. Meaning you will be able to show image/html/flash ads AND textads on the same spot. Using the same admentor code.
Here is an example on how it looks on a dummy page:
What made me SO happy was that I had plabbed to work with it for THRE whole days - but believe it or not, today I have one of those moments - as it needed some major changes in sp:s, DAL interface, MySQL+MSSQL DAL, business layer, GUI, banner serving engine, cache dependency for template files and XML eading of the same etc I wrote code for 2 hours without even trying to compile - and the first time I got ZERO compilation errrors. And even better - it worked as well!!! I have since then made some minor changes, and even found and fixed out one major flaw in my implementation, but still - tomorrow is saturday and I am really thinking of buying some lottery tickets :)
Finally - I know you are all wondering when it will be available to you - well, 15th of May 2007 is the date set. And keeping that date sure is looking good as of now.