For those of you who were enjoying this site without the commercialism of advertising you will have noticed the addition of said evil. Figuring out how to add advertisements (adverts or ads) to my page has been one of the many things I’ve been meaning to do in learning about using Joomla!. I don’t know if I’m doing it the “correct”or official Joomla! way. Here’s how I got it to work.
I support an organization called Kiva and they have written the code that you can add to your page to help support them. I copied said code and set about trying to figure out how to put it on my page and then how to get it the way I want. So it turns out that under Banners under Components you first have to setup Clients and Categories. I suggest setting up the category first then the client and then the actual ad.
There’s a little catch for setting up the clients though. You need to have a contact name and email. Since I didn’t have either really for these I made up something. If you are selling advertising directly then you will have this information. So I set up a client for Kiva and then created a banner. I ended up creating a banner, regardless of how I wanted it to display or where it was going to display.
Depending on the layout of the advert and where I want it displayed I use one of two modules. I use either the Banner module or the Advertisement module. If you have just one ad per client it’s not big deal. I however wanted to put up two ads for Kiva and they are different in their layouts. To do this the easiest thing was to create two clients. When I name them I try to name them based on where they go or their position on the page.
With two clients it makes it easier to put in either the ads or banners. I tried not doing it and Joomla! tried to display my banner ad off to the right side and it tried to put my tall ad down below my banner ad making the page unnecessarily long. So I use multiple clients for the same customer.
The next trick for me came with wanting to put multiple ads down the right side to sort of stack them. For this I just made copies of the Advertisement module and put the different ads in the additional module copies. This works well because then you can name the copy so you know what position it has on the page.
Unless you are creating a site that is really only personal or for a small group, at some point you are going to have a need for the Banner module or the Advertisement module or both.
Cheers
Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.
