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  1.2 About this project  

  1.2.1 History  

 


In 1998 Tobias Ratschiller created phpMyAdmin, a tool to administer MySQL databases, written in PHP. After the launch of phpwizard.net, the home of the phpMyAdmin project, more projects were added, like phpIRC, phpChat, phpPolls and phpAds.

PhpAds started out as a free tool, which let developers place banners on their website. The code was released under the GPL licence and a whole community of users grew around this wonderful piece of software. After about a year and four releases the project was abandoned because Tobias didn't have the time to continue working on it.

Meanwhile phpAds had really become a popular solution. People were asking for new features and started fixing the still existing bugs. Because the development on phpAds wasn't controlled by anyone anymore Wim Godden decided it was time to breath life again in the old phpAds project. PhpAdsNew was born, a new project, based on the old phpAds source code.

Wim started working on improving the old source code, adding new features and fixing the remaining issues. PhpAds 1.4 grew into phpAdsNew 1.5 and kept evolving into phpAdsNew 1.8. Because the time involved to maintain a project like phpAdsNew Wim asked for developers to help him improve phpAdsNew. A number of other developers like Phil Hord and Niels Leenheer joined the project and added their own new features. After the release of phpAdsNew 1.9 the developers really felt the project lacked a number of features which prevented the project becoming a mature ad server.

Niels took it upon him to lead the development of phpAdsNew 2. The goals for phpAdsNew 2 were very high and a lot of work was spend on rewriting the code to make it more stable and implementing the features that were really essential for any serious ad server. With the help of a lot of developers all kinds of new features were added and a completely new user interface was developed. There are just too many changes in phpAdsNew to completely list them here. Halfway during the development of phpAdsNew 2 Matteo Beccati created a PostgreSQL port of phpAdsNew and joined the project to help us. Later on Stefan Morgenroth joined the project and contributed his own continuation of the phpAds project, called phpAdsPlus. A number of features found in phpAdsPlus, such as Flash support, were still missing in phpAdsNew and they were quickly adapted for phpAdsNew.

After 8 months and 6 beta versions it was decided to work towards the final release of phpAdsNew 2. This doesn't mean the development of phpAdsNew is coming to an end. Beta 7 will be the last 2.0 beta, but we are already planning new additions and great new features.

What can you expect from us in the future?
With the release of phpAdsNew 2 we think we have the basic requirements for a mature ad server, and this is the main thing we are focussing on right now. After this very important milestone we can build on these basic features and create an even better solution. It is too early to give a complete feature list for the next major release of phpAdsNew but there are some things we want to work on in the future. Traditionally phpAdsNew is written to be deployed on only one website. This doesn't mean the current release isn't able to server ads for multiple websites, but it isn't optimised for this purpose. This is one of the things we want to change in the next major release. In addition to this we want to introduce more advanced features like user sessions which allow use to target users individually and much much more.
Stay tuned!

Also a final note: Wim, Phil, Niels, Matteo and Stefan are not the only developers who worked on this piece of software. PhpAdsNew wouldn't the same without all the code contributed by a large number of other developers. Thanks to everyone who helped make this project possible, you know who you are. Also many thanks to Tobias Ratschiller who started all of this, without his early work on phpAds this project would probably not exist.

 

 
   
  1.2.2 Press info  

 


PhpAdsNew is a free and open-source project dedicated to developing a mature ad serving solution for low and medium sized websites. PhpAdsNew evolved out of the phpAds project created by Tobias Ratschiller and is currently developed by a group of independent PHP programmers. Because of its capabilities and expandability phpAdsNew is increasingly used on high profile websites to help them generate the revenue needed to keep their websites running. More information about phpAdsNew can be found on www.phpadsnew.com