It’s been quite for the past 3 weeks or so around AdRotate. Mostly because I usually take a bit of a cooldown after each release. But also because my shoulder screwed up last week. Typing with one hand is harder than you may thing. And running a business lacking the upper right part of your body is even harder. Sigh. But it’s slowly getting better.

Post Injection

Today I managed to get some stuff done for the next version of AdRotate which will improve (once again) Post Injection. The new regex filter introduced in a recent version doesn’t work as well as I’d thought. Some people have reported missing parts of content such as galleries or like buttons. Highly undesirable. And suddenly I was so fed up with the damn feature that I, for a moment, considered just removing the feature altogether.

Alas, sanity came back quick enough and I decided to re-do the options available in it a bit.
The ‘insert adverts every Nth paragraph’ option goes away. It doesn’t work, it’s broken and I’m tired of wasting time to try and fix it.
Instead we’re going for a lighter faster code that adds adverts after certain paragraphs and a new function that adds an advert in the middle of a post. Using this option AdRotate counts the paragraphs and adds the advert close to the middle.

HTML5 advertising

HTML5 keeps growing as an advertising thing. This is good. I like the format. Anything that allows you to ditch Flash adverts is good. A common problem with HTML5 ads is that they usually consist of various files. Typically a HTML file, a Javascript file and sometimes a set of images/assets.

Currently AdRotate has no good way of managing those extra files. Leaving you with a mess of files and inconsistent crap to work with. The next version of AdRotate will address that.
The AdRotate Pro Media Manager will accept those extra files and in effect will be more of a file/asset manager than a banner image manager from then on. You can easily upload your assets for each advert and therefor create your HTML5 advertising campaign more easily.

Often with minimal tweaks to the actual adverts beyond perhaps renaming the files or changing a path.

HTML5 adverts setup help

Because HTML5 adverts often need a tweak or 3 to work on your particular site I’ll be expanding my services to help you with that. If your advertiser shoves a bunch of files your way and you’re not sure how to put it together I’ll help you with that for a small fee. This fee is the same as my WordPress support fee – Check prices here.

I will not make adverts from scratch or fix broken ones. I am no graphics designer either. If you have no graphics or creatives for the advert, get those from your advertiser first.
I will help you tailor your specific and working adverts to work on your site with AdRotate.

AdRotate is now ranked the 95th most popular plugin according to the Periodic table of Plugins for WordPress. Which uses actual data from wordpress.org.

What’s even better, if you look at all the plugins in the periodic table. AdRotate is the only advertising plugin on there (at the time of writing). This makes AdRotate the most popular advertising plugin for WordPress.

As you may know, there are over 36000 plugins available. Being in the top 100 of most popular plugins is no small feat I think. Being the most popular advertising plugin for WordPress is huge.

Last month AdRotate Pro and AdRotate Free underwent a small but important change in how updates are done. Updates are of-course important for advancing the plugin. Keeping things secure and modern. And to complete these updates you may see this banner from time to time after the update via WordPress.

What happens when you click it

Some updates may require you to click the big “update now” button. For example if the database has changed or certain data sets need updating. It’s important to do these updates from time to time to add new features, improve existing features or generally to make the plugin better.

For example, in a recent update the budgeting fields in the database were changed to accommodate future features. Another update re-instated the automated maintenance routines in AdRotate. And yet another update re-did a few indexes in the database to make things faster.

Well so much for version control and fancy methods. Earlier today I released updates for AdRotate Pro and AdRotate Free which contained a few issues. AdRotate Free was more affected and notably broke Dynamic groups and Block groups. In AdRotate Pro on some setups adverts wouldn’t save correctly if you have Geo Targeting enabled.

Somehow files got mixed up and for both releases I released the wrong files… Or, that’s what I gather so far. I guess I’ll go back to managing files manually myself. Something similar to this happened last year also, you may recall a broken release sometime in March last year :(.
I have tested the correct versions some more just to be sure and they are indeed working. Updates are being pushed out right now.

If you have received a beta/test version in the last few hours – You can either keep that version or update to this official release. Aside from the ‘b1’ marker on the version number the versions are identical.

AdRotate Pro 3.12.8

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• [fix] strip_tags error when saving adverts on some setups
• [fix] Typo on AdRotate Info page

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AdRotate Free 3.11.6

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• [fix] Output of Dynamic groups and Block groups
• [fix] Notice error on schedules page
• [fix] Typo on AdRotate Info page

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