I need to do some banenr ad tracking, and I used to like phpAds, so I went hunting and found the latest version is phpAdsNew. I grabbed the source and unpacked it, but there wasn’t anything in there about how to install, so I went back to the website. In the support area they have an admin manual and a users manual. That made me happy. Unfortunately they were both in pdf which couldn’t be opened with either xpdf or ggv, which made me sad.
Since I was up for adventure, I just uploaded everything and pointed my browser at it. Up came a VERY pretty pre-install page, asking me to click to continure. The next page offered the GPL and and a form to accept it, and I did so. The next page asked me to create an Admin account. No sweat. The next page, mysql account info. That worked like a charm.
Then it said my install was complete, and I could enter the settings area to tweak whatever I wanted, and begin using it. All in all, a very very easy, very pleasant install. What I think all web based apps should be like if they can.
Once I logged in, it had a very nice looking, well organized admin area. There was a yellow box at the top though that said:
"Click Proceed to go the configuration page, where you can set up more settings.
Please do not forget to lock the config.inc.php file when you are finished to prevent security breaches."
I hadn’t seen or heard anything about “locking” or “unlocking” any files, so I wasn’t quite sure what they meant. I checked file system permissions, and they were 644, which seemed safe enough to me. It bugged me, so I finally downloaded the pdf’s and opened them on a windows box.
Apparently at the beginning I was supposed to chmod a+w. I’ve always used the numbers, so that didn’t mean much to me, and it worked even without that, so I thought I’d do what they said to close it, which was chmod a-w. That totally borked it, so I set it to chmod a+w which didn’t fix it, so I went back to 644 and it was fine. Then I logged out and back in, and lo and behold the file was “locked” now.
One other drawback is that it looks like there’s just one account, and it has full privs. I’d prefer to see a sub account that can only look at stats, so I can have a péon look at stats.
So, on the one hand, it had an amazing interface. On the other hand, docs were a little funny.
I haven’t actually used it to post and track banners yet, but it looks intensely powerful, and while the docs were a pain to have to open on a windows box, they looked quite complete.
