Errata: I have made a small error in the video tutorial. The CRON command to schedule the OpenX maintenance should’ve been:

/web/cgi-bin/php5
/home/content/c/o/u/couponsvault/html/ox/maintenance/maintenance.php
www.couponcodesvault.com

 

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The second week is almost over, I wish I had more time to work on this case study lately! I have now installed OpenX on my GoDaddy shared hosting account. OpenX (aka OpenAds) is a free ad server developed in PHP. It’s very useful to track clicks, geotargeting and lots more.

I’ve made a video tutorial to show you how to install OpenX on your GoDaddy account:

Can’t see this video? Watch it on YouTube.com!

Unfortunately the original video lasted longer than allowed by YouTube so I’m gonna have to make another one to show you how to display ads using OpenX.

Stay tuned, I’ll be posting this by tomorrow!

For those who didn’t know, the OpenAds project has now changed name for OpenX. The developers have decided to rebrand the product in order to gain more flexibility.

I was a bit unconfortable to upgrade to OpenX as a name change gives you the impression it might be a total different application but in fact, it’s simply OpenAds 2.4.4. So since I’ve got OpenAds 2.4.3 installed, it should be no problem.

I always keep a good backup of my websites so restoring OpenAds to its previous version is going to be quick if I need to do it. By the way, I always have my servers upload a daily, weekly and monthly backup to my workstation so that I always have a backup handy.

For those who use a phpAdsNew or older OpenAds version than 2.4.3, please read OpenX documentation.

Basically, the upgrade process is pretty straightforward:

1. Grab yourself a copy of OpenX.
2. Extract the files from the archive and upload them to your web server, overwriting the previous installation.
3. Point your browser to the root of your OpenX installation directory.
4. Go through the setup wizard. You may have some folder permissions to set.

That’s pretty much it. I didn’t need to update the invocation code in my web pages.

By the way, if you haven’t upgraded to PHP5 yet, it’s time you start thinking about it. OpenX has a discussion about supporting PHP5 exclusively. Read more about it here.