Oh yes… I’ve upgraded AdRotate Pro version 3.8 on http://meandmymac.net to see how that went. Almost flawless 
Yay.
This experiment helps me figure out the proper procedure for upgrading and any cave-ats you might run into when upgrading yourself. AdRotate Pro is as good as finished now and final testing is well under way.
Here are some snazzy snaps of the new dashboards -
Tiny update to change the support links to the new system I’m launching today.
One small bugfix in AdRotate but mostly this update is aimed at updating the dashboard to no longer link to the forums but to the new ticket system instead.
[fix] Typo in query when selecting ads for groups
[change] Support links in dashboard
Since the forum was malfunctioning and was overrun by spam bots and fake users every minute or so. I decided to close the forums directly and work out a new way of supporting plugins. Having been unhappy with how the forum worked for weeks this was the last straw, so to speak.
Over the past days I’ve been looking for and testing a new system. I think I’ve found a good alternative.
Your very own support center for everything that involves my business.
http://www.ajdg.net/support/ BOOM BABY!
Ticket support. This means more personal assistance. Still free. And a knowledge base too. This will replace the current manuals and provide a more flexible way of finding information. Instead of a clumsy set of untameable HTML pages this is now all powered by WordPress and some plugins. With tags, categories and everything a knowledge base needs.
As for support. You’ll need an account, just like you did on the forum. You can ask any and all questions pertaining to my services, AdRotate and other products here and of course; use the knowledge base! I have created and expanded the FAQ a bit. I’ve made some tweaks to the current manuals which I imported into the knowledge base and will add more manuals where required.
So everyone – Please forget the dumb forums. Update your bookmark to remove the forums and add http://www.ajdg.net/support/ for future endeavors!
In response to a report yesterday morning that AdRotate was at risk I have made a number of changes to the plugin to ensure your websites safety.
Additionally several small issues that have been reported before have been fixed as well.
[fix] Division by 0 error on some stats reports
[fix] Removed slashes when editing block wrapper
[fix] Advertiser Emails now populated with user info
[fix] Potential flaw to renew ads that aren’t yours
[change] Improved data sanitation
[change] Improved variable use on some functions
[change] Improved ad state cache
If you want to try out the patches and do not wish to wait for Automattic to finally allow AdRotate back into the repository please download the RC below.
Release Candidate, as you might know, means it’s past Beta and ready for release if no bugs are found.
Some more tweaks and minor improvements.
I redid the upgrade code so it works more reliable when you upgrade from older (3.6 and older) versions.
More discrete error messages
Expanded the debug information a bit. If your upgrade seems to have failed you can now review a ‘log’ and somewhat determine where it went wrong. This will help in troubleshooting issues related to upgrading.
There are no notable changes in the translation files.
[new] Upgrade Log Debug hook
[change] Optimized and more reliable upgrade script and trigger
[change] More discrete error messages when ads are not available
Find it Here!
If there are no further issues and quirks this will likely be the last release for a while. I need to focus on AdRotate Pro and related services in the next few months and develop a steady product which is worthy of buying.
Not all of this will necessarily be included but they’re points of interest and things to explore over the next few months.
With rc8 just released i hope this will be the last of it. I cannot find any more bugs or quirks. I hope you discover the same. So I hope I can finally release AdRotate 3.7 soon.
I am quite excited and pleased with how this whole development cycle went. All be it a bit longer than expected. I really think the feedback form in the betas helps a lot and gives people an easy effortless way to send in their comments and ideas. And many did! dozens of useful emails with even more useful tips, bugs and suggestions. Awesome!
So what will 3.7 bring, in a nutshell.
Aside from over 21 bug fixes there are also a number of changes and tweaks to improve current things. But more importantly there are a number of new features.
The current wrapper feature will remain, as requested by many people, the new wrapper will work together with the current to provide an easier and better way to creating blocks. Previously blocks simply lined up ads and inserted a LineBreak to create multiple rows in your grid. AdRotate now uses some sophisticated calculations to create and actual grid using valid CSS and HTML. This grid is made dynamically and resizes itself based on the ads available. This means that if you tell the block to show 10 adverts and only 6 are available, those 4 extra spaces are simply not shown. Not wasting your pixels in your ad location with silly empty space. It is also now possible to add more advanced borders, spacing and margin to the blocks using valid CSS without actually knowing or writing CSS. So novice users could benefit greatly of this.
Note that due to the new wrapper you will need to reconfigure a few things for each block you have, otherwise the grid is not properly created and the block will show in a funny way!
This allows you add adverts to pages and posts without editing your theme or even using shortcodes. For now this feature is only available for Groups. And if successful might be expanded to blocks. Depending on feedback.
Basically what this does is offer a simple setting where you decide to add advertisements to posts in categories or pages, as many as you want. You can add adverts to the top or bottom or both locations using a simple dropdown menu and selection box.
AdRotate 3.7 will allow exporting of statistics to a CSV file. In the early stages of development for 3.7 I’d been tasked to create this for someone and I think I’ve created an easy to use set of options. Every advert, group or block can have its statistics exported. You can choose a month or a whole year to export and have the file emailed to you (or a select group) or download it. This feature will be built on and expanded in a future release to improve overall statistics displaying.
Have this ad that you want to show only on Mondays and only allow 10,000 impressions on that day? And this other ad that only shows during lunchtime (your time) and disables after 12 clicks? Timeframes can do that. Replacing the normal start and end date system and allowing fine-grained control of when what shows and for how long. Every advert can have unlimited timeframes.
A number of improvements have been made to make AdRotate faster and less of a burden for your servers resources. This is especially important on heavy traffic sites and sites that have AdRotate working for a longer period (bigger databases). Notable changes are that if your database uses innoDB but AdRotate does not. AdRotate will convert itself to innoDB. The bigger tables now use indexes which will speed up searching for records on some servers. Stats tracking is now a bit more picky on what to save and cleans up better after itself. This means that less data is saved and more is removed when it’s no longer needed. This is all done automatically and in the background. And lastly. Several features that ran cleanup tasks and other database intensive things now run on a schedule instead of every page load. This will greatly increase loading time of pages and overall site performance for some users. The database is cleaned up every 3 hours instead of every page load for instance. On heavy traffic sites this will have some positive effect.
After you’ll upgrade to AdRotate 3.7 you’ll be prompted with the normal stuff. But when you upgrade and you use blocks or groups. Reserve some time, 1-2 hours, to review your current configuration and make some changes were required. Do *NOT* expect everything to work right out the box if you’re upgrading.
1. If you use blocks. You’ll need to reconfigure them, all of them. Take note of the size of the ads in those blocks and at least specify the size for each block. If ads in the block have different sizes simply use the largest size.
2. The blocks are now calculated by rows vs columns (similar to a spreadsheet program) instead of X ads in X many rows.
3. If you have pages and categories selected to show certain ads using hacks in your theme or by using shortcodes. You might want to go for the post injection method. This will allow you greater flexibility in some situations.
4. Current start and end times will be migrated into timeframes but you might wanna review them and start using a more advanced sales schedule for your ads selling periods of the day or week to show ads giving your advertisers a better audience for their adverts.
If you are unable to upgrade yourself I can help you out for a fee - http://adrotateplugin.com/page/services.php. And of course there is the forum for all regular questions.
You might remember a few months ago when i wrote about wanting to make AdRotate faster.
Using input and tips from several users and redefining some strategies within AdRotate we’ve accomplished a few improvements.
Most notable changes:
1. No indexes.
AdRotate uses no indexes for the larger tables. Up until a month or so ago i didn’t know what that did. Now i know all about them.
The upcoming version of AdRotate will use indexes for the large and ever changing stats tables. So far, this seems to load stats on the dashboard notably faster.
(Thanks to Ed for his input and idea)
2. Cleaning up garbage data on every page load.
On every page load AdRotate looks in the database to see if old stats and timers can be cleared out. On busy websites this can take a few seconds with little or nothing to do.
Imagine this to happen 100 times a minute in a table that has more than 200000 records. Each of those records will have to be checked. For every page load.
For small sites this is no issue. But larger and more professional sites this is no longer acceptable.
The indexes mentioned above will help in this. But also wp-cron.
Wp-cron is a feature for timed schedules. AdRotate will run its routines every 3 hours instead of every page load. This will greatly reduce the MySQL traffic and query use.
(Thanks for user Winky for this idea)
3. 2 queries for each ad on the dashboard. Before you see any details.
AdRotate typically used 2 or 3 queries for each ad when you’re going through the dashboard.
No more. AdRotate will now compile 3 arrays using 1 query. Then when you click a specific ad it will load its details. But not before.
Also this will reduce MySQL traffic in a big way.
Going forward:
These new methods will be tested on my personal sites over the next few weeks and tweaked for performance.
If you have more ideas on how to make AdRotate faster and give it a smaller footprint on your server. Let me know on the forum.
Some orders recently inspired me to create a new, more specific, package and we’ll run a trial for that starting today.
If people like it we’ll keep it on the page.
We’ve learned that a few users would rather have us set up just the groups and blocks. Make the necessary theme edits but *not* create ads.
In many of those cases adverts haven’t been sold yet. Or the administrator has appointed someone else to handle adverts.
So buying our time to set up adverts makes little sense there.
Thus, our response to this is as follows.
New package!
I’ve come up with a new package on our service page.
No ads, more groups, a block of ads and the same styling options.
For a reduced price compared to a full package.
You’ll find this package under the name “integrate” on our Premium Setup page.
