OpenX Blog

We want to internationalize Openads including the product, forums and documentation but we need your help!

We’ve been talking about this for a while now and we’ve already had offers of help and contributions from the Openads Community. Now we’d like to go further to ensure we provide more complete language support, so we’re asking you to step forward and help out.

There are so many languages that we’d like to cover: Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (both traditional and simplified), Czech, Dutch, French, German, Polish, Russian, Spanish… ze list goes on and on!

Initially, we are going to focus on getting the most popular languages right. We’re also looking to open up new forums where we see enough interest to ensure success.

If you are interested in becoming a volunteer for Openads then tell us how you would like to help.

So, what are you zinking about? Helping internationalize Openads… we hope so!

We’re pleased to announce the Openads 2.3.39 beta release. This release includes important bug fixes and addresses known upgrade issues.

This version contains the following updates:

• Database banner-cache is now rebuilt after upgrade, fixing an issue with ads clicking through to adclick.php rather than the defined click file (default ck.php).
• Users who installed 2.3.34-beta can now use the installer to upgrade.
• Installation/upgrade while the MySQL variable lower_case_table_names is set to a non-zero value is re-enabled.
• Enhancements to 2.0/2.1.29 upgrade paths.

For full details on the new version, please see the Openads 2.3.39 beta release notes.

Thank you to all of you for your continued feedback. Please continue to report back your experiences in the forum.

Download the new version now »

We are looking for for a creative web manager to help take our web site to the next level. If this is you, please let us know!

Performance Objectives:
Reporting into the Marketing Director you will play a pivotal role in developing and maintaining the company’s web properties.

Site development:
Responsible for implementing the ongoing development of the company’s websites.
You will also be responsible for performing day-to-day site maintenance.
Additional responsibilities will include document web best practices and write maintainable XHTML/CSS/PHP code

Site Design:
Responsible for setting company standards for website and web apps design, performing navigation and browser compatibility, performing quality-control for third party content, and maintaining and develop web applications.

Computer skills required:

1. Expert understanding of (x)HTML and CSS - ability of creating standard compliant code
2. Experience PHP/MySQL.
3. Understanding of SSH and SVN commands would be a requirement.
4. Skills in website maintenance using Joomla & Wordpress
5. Graphic design skills for web design or print design using programs such as Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Filemaker Pro / Mailman.
6. Familiarity with Enterprise web applications and distributed Architectures.
7. Experience installing and configuring open source software is a plus.
8. Familiarity with Wikipedia and with wikis in general is a plus.
9. Passion for Open Source Software.

Qualifications:
Graduate

Apply today!
We’d love to hear from you! Email your resume to hr@openads.org.

A bug has been discovered which blocks new installations of Openads 2.3.34 beta from upgrading. We expect to release a fix as part of Openads 2.3.39 beta late this week.

You can identify this bug by the error message displayed when attempting to upgrade:

* database integrity check detected problems with the database
* 30 indexes to remove
* 30 indexes to add

Please don’t try to work around this error as any manual changes to the database may make your system incompatible with the Openads upgrade wizard. The patch is on it’s way!

Technical details can be found here on the forum.

Hi all,

My name is Sarah, and I am here to do a bit of talent spotting. I am here to recruit talent into Openads. My objective is to find you, interview you, hire you and develop you.

Are you hiding on a blog? A job board? Behind the morning news or at an event. Don’t worry, I will find you but maybe you want to make yourself visible to me. Why don’t you contact me so that I can see you?

I have been at Openads for a week now and I can see a lot of talent, energy and most of all I can see passion. Soon you can see exactly what we are looking for on our career site. In the meantime we are always looking for devoted developers, product managers and project managers.

Email me at sarah@openads.org … I can’t wait to hear from you!

Openads was indirectly slashdotted this morning in an article about Google facing antitrust charges associated with the purchase of DoubleClick. In the post, Openads was introduced as an Open Source alternative to the DoubleClick adserver and as a consequence we’ve been getting a lot of interest.

We just wanted to say hello to the slashdot readers and give an open invitation: Ask us a question about Openads… we’ll make sure to respond.

My name is Melany and I have joined Openads this week as  Marketing Director.

My head is spinning by the rate at which things are moving around here and I love it!

One of the things that attracted me most to Openads it’s the fast growing community of publishers and developers, and the chance that I am given to make it bigger, stronger, better.

Epictetus said ‘We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak’ I want to be this type of marketeer.

I’d like to take some time to get to know you, to pay attention to your needs, your desires, your interests, your frustrations, and I’ll do my best to respond appropriately.

So I have set up tellme@openads.org.

Mind you, don’t ask me any technical questions, you’ll be very disappointed, but anything else about the product, the website, the communications, the blog, the forum etc etc…just tell me.

Ciao
Melany

Just a quick post to say that we’ll be migrating web services between servers today around 12:00 GMT.

The switch over should be quite quick but we will need to take the forum offline for a short time while we copy the database over.

We’ll update this post once the work is complete.

[Update: we're done now, everything should be running smoothly again]

Direct ad space sales bring in some of the highest revenues but also require the greatest effort to arrange. In Scott’s recent interview, Jeremy from Shoemoney describes how he sells ad space on his blog using a fixed price monthly tenancy rather than using CPM, CPC or CPA rates.

We surveyed the OpenX community to find out how they package their inventory for direct ad sales:

• 45% charge on a CPM rate (payment based on the number of times the ad is displayed)
• 38% sell a tenancy (payment based on displaying ads for a fixed period of time, regardless of the number of impressions)
• 13% charge on a CPC rate (payment based on the number of visitors who click on the ad)
• 4% charge on a CPA rate (payment based on visitors which click on an ad and go on to purchase a product / service)

Have your say… What’s the best way to do direct sales? What factors affects your choice?

Related links:
OpenX blog: How to set up your site for selling direct
OpenX forum: How do you price direct ad sales?

Jeremy Schoemaker, Shoemoney blog author and founder of Auction Ads, invited Scott Switzer to join him on the Shoemoney show this week.

Openads was my guest on the 8-14-2007 Shoemoney show. We discussed the basics of Openads, how advertisers can use it to make money, and the future of Openads. I think it should be pretty informative for anyone who uses Openads or just wanted to learn more about it.

Listen to the radio show.