OpenX Blog

Over the years, there has been quite an effort to support as many versions of PHP and MySQL as possible. This makes it easier for publishers to install OpenX with as little hassle as possible. In the past year, there has been a large effort to convince web applications and web hosts to drop support for PHP 4. In fact, the PHP folks have announced the end of life of PHP 4 (sniff, sniff), with security fixes stopping on 8/8/08.

While it is only a matter of time before we drop PHP 4 support, we are considering removing support for versions of OpenX above v2.5. If this decision is made, this will mean that from May/June 2008, OpenX will require PHP 5.

Here are some of the reasons:

Pros

• Faster time to develop
• Simpler, more maintainable code
• Better libraries (most PHP libraries are now being developed only for PHP 5)
• Our new plugin system can take advantage of PHP 5 tools and libraries
• Test cycles take much shorter (automated tests do not need to run over all iterations of PHP 4)

Cons

• Publishers with PHP 4 will either have to upgrade PHP or switch hosting providers if they want to move to versions of OpenX beyond v2.5

Who does this affect?

When we did analysis of who would be affected, we looked at publishers who are on a recent version of OpenX (2.3 and above). Roughly 65% of these users are already using PHP 5.

In addition, people who do not have the technical expertise to upgrade to PHP 5 can use our hosted version (when it comes out of beta!).

Please let me know in the comments or through our email address (hello at openx dot org) what your thoughts are. Please be specific why you want to keep or drop support for PHP 4.

We really want community involvement in this decision.

Thanks.

We have released an update for the stable version of OpenX. OpenX (v2.4.4) contains bug fixes, performance enhancements and a new colour scheme to match the new OpenX brand.

But wait, there’s more! Don’t worry, it’s not a box opener but something even better… big improvements to our translation files.

As you may be aware, some of our translation files date back years. The quality of each translation varied, most were incomplete and some completely broken. We’ve been working with community members to update key translation files. Our work has focused on the upcoming beta release but we were able to backport some significant enhancements to our current stable release for your enjoyment.

Before this release, key translation files were a mess:

1. Simplified Chinese was completely broken
2. Russian was unusable for most publishers
3. Brazilian Portuguese needed to be restarted from scratch
4. Spanish and French were only partially complete
5. Even German, our best translation, needed some work!

All of these languages are dramatically improved. We know these aren’t perfect but they are largely complete with the exceptions of some hard coded strings in the application.

The next stable release of OpenX will have even better translations for more languages. We’d love your help to make this happen. Please contact us if you would like to assist us with the ongoing internationalisation work.

(By the way, we’ve repackaged this release as publishers were unable to unpack the archive cleanly on their windows desktops – damn you pesky case insensitive file system! Our apologies for any inconvenience this caused.)

Find out more in the release notes or download the latest release of OpenX today.

Jon Miller, the former CEO of AOL, has joined as chairman of the OpenX. I could list a million things that Jon accomplished in his career, but one stands out: every person I have spoken with that has worked for Jon would enthusiastically work for him again, and many consider him their mentor. To me, that one thing says the most about a person.

Why do we need Jon for OpenX? What does it mean for our publisher community?

Jon has much experience working with major advertisers, as well as large and small publishers. He understands how difficult it is to provide software, service, and media to medium to small publishers, which is the core user base of OpenX. He can help us grow from a small company to a larger one. He understands our need to continue to focus on making OpenX simple, scalable, and extendable. He is a true believer of open source (like our other investors).

The vision of OpenX is to help our publishers make more money online. Jon will help us do that.

Please help me welcome Jon to the OpenX team!

Media coverage snapshot
Reuters: “The titans are doing fine, but there’s a whole new generation. I believe Openads is one of those,”
Cnet: OpenX, one the industry’s largest ad networks and the dominant open-source ad server company
Clickz: Jonathan Miller was appointed to the new position of chairman of open source ad serving platform OpenX.
Silicon alley insider: Former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller has joined online ad firm OpenX as chairman

There are lots of questions about the OpenX site and brand. Here is a consolidated FAQ about the changes:

Why did you change the name? I like Openads!
When a software project is a grass roots effort (rather than a company), the only consideration that is made regarding the name is whether it is available in Sourceforge. There are no other considerations taken into account. We needed to create a name for our company that has not just one dimension (it is an appropriate name for an open source ad server), but many dimensions (e.g. will extend to other products as well). Changing a name is a very difficult decision, and we did not take this task lightly. We spent months choosing a name. Mel and I finally came to a decision with OpenX, and we stand behind it. I can promise you that this is the last time.

What’s with the new site design?
The goal is to make the site as simple as possible to a vast number of users - from developers with tons of technical expertise, to bloggers who will find it challenging with the most simple of technical tasks. Over the past year, we have changed the site a number of times in response to community feedback. We will continue to evolve the site based on your feedback, so please let us know how we can improve the site, so that it is pleasing and easy to use.

How will the product change?
There will be no change in the way the ad server gets installed or upgraded. The brand name of the product will now become OpenX. If you do not customise the ad server, the new logo will appear in the upper left corner of the product. We are evolving the look and feel of the ad server to be much cleaner than before (Niels did a great job with the UI, but it is showing its age after four years!). Here is a screenshot of the new product:

OpenX Ad Server is an application like an online bank account - publishers use it for arguably the most important part of their job - making revenue. All changes to the product are there to add efficiency to the workflow. Every element that is changed or added to the site is analysed with this in mind.

Does my feedback matter?
Absolutely. We are building OpenX - the site and the product - for the community. We are very dependent on feedback, both good and bad, from the community. Developing in a vacuum will result in a product that nobody wants. Please keep your feedback coming. Tell us how we can improve our site or product so that it works better for you. Please be as constructive as possible, so that we can take action on your feedback.

After news a few weeks ago of our new investment and the beta of the hosted version of our ad server software, we’ve got more news to share. We did it again, we’ve changed the name of Openads to OpenX.

In the past few months we have spent lots of time with folk in our publisher community to understand better what you want from us. Simply, you want us to make it easier for you to make money online. We’ve already started, launching the beta of the hosted version of our software which we’re scaling as fast as possible to meet the overwhelming demand we see (publishers from over 60 countries have signed up for the beta program!).

This is just the first example of how we plan to move with our publishers beyond our core open source ad serving software. That will always be our heart and soul. But as we start to roll out our hosted service and look towards the future, we thought the time was right to evolve our name to reflect the suite of services we hope one day to offer our publisher community.

Find out more:
Scott has posted a consolidated FAQ about the changes.

So you’ve seen ‘Open water’ and you are still interested in diving into the deep blue sea? Then the DeeperBlue.net website is for you. Whether you are a total beginner looking for some ideas or an experienced diver with a craving for cutting edge equipment. DeeperBlue.net will keep you in touch with news covering sports events and affairs in the submarine universe, galleries capturing extraordinary scenes, courses on offer and forums as well as shopping where you can grab real bargains. Freediving, scuba, spearfishing and technical diving…they have it all.

DeeperBlue.net use Openads to deliver their banner ads and they have been using Openads for years now. We asked DeeperBlue.net if they would recommend Openads for other web publishers: ‘Yes, it’s an open-source, free, enterprise level ad server and it is absolutely brilliant!’

Over the past two weeks, I have met over 40 publishers, ad networks, exchanges, aggregators, and other people close to the online advertising industry, in London, San Francisco, and New York. I try to meet people in the industry as much as possible, but I don’t think that I have had this many meetings in such a concentrated time frame ever. Yes, this means that I averaged 4 meetings per day for two straight weeks.

The goal of these meetings was to get feedback on some new product initiatives that we have been thinking about. There is no substitute to designing product with the customers that are going to be users. The input we received has been incredibly helpful. Thank you to everyone who we have met - your feedback is much appreciated.

During most of the meetings, I asked people the following questions:

What would you change about the Openads ad server?
How do you think Openads should evolve in the future?

It is amazing how much feedback you can get from such open-ended questions. Feedback came back not necessarily answering my questions, but more asking how people can work with and adapt Openads:

Can I use Openads to serve video? What types?
Do you have plans for a mobile ad server?
Can I use Openads to power my ad network?
How can I contribute my modifications back to Openads?

Openads is typically used to power the advertising for a website. In other words, it is typically a publisher ad server. Almost every single instance of Openads is used in this way. However, over time, we get tons of requests (and lots of real world examples too!) to use Openads in a different manner.

Basically, we have plans to add all of these features into Openads. But - is this the right thing?

Why would a small website that rotates Google AdSense with Advertising.com care about conversion tracking? Why would a mobile provider care about rich media video? Why would an advertiser want advanced inventory management?

A single version of Openads cannot be all things to all people. If we continue down this path, Openads will work for everybody, and will be usable for nobody. In addition, if Openads does not foster community (e.g. developer AND user) support for these features, they will stay on the roadmap and not be built.

How do we find a solution that will work for everybody?

Create a plugin system.
We have spent a huge amount of time rewriting major parts of Openads so that the code is more modular, understandable, and maintainable. For example, we created a single Data Access Layer. What this means is that we spent the time to move all of the database calls into a single place. It took lots of time to do this (look at the phpAdsNew 2.0 code if you don’t believe me). However, we have seen the fruits of our labor. We have been able to quickly add a Web Service API, and support for Postgres DB by plugging these features directly into our data access layer.

We need to expand our efforts to include all parts of the application into our plugin system.

Move some Openads functionality to plugins.
After creating a system of plugins, the next logical step is to move many of the ‘fringe’ features of Openads into plugins. For example, Openads has conversion tracking functionality that most publishers do not use (it is mainly an advertiser feature). This would be an excellent candidate to move into a plugin.

The overall goal is to create a core ad server that is generic in nature, with plugins that will make it fit to a specific user’s requirements.

Identify the major types of uses of Openads.
Based on feedback, surveys, and other data, I can safely hypothesize that the major ways people use Openads are:
a) simple publisher ad server
b) advanced publisher ad server
c) ad network ad server
d) mobile ad server
e) rich media ad server

Create a community around each user type
Once it is easy to understand and modify Openads for developers, we need to create a robust development community around each type of use. This way, there is no limitation for using Openads for any purpose.

Conclusion
In short, we cannot be all things to all people. There are so many ways to use Openads, and so many features to build, that we cannot be successful without the community helping out. Our strategy to do this is to make it easy for the community to modify Openads, build plugins on top of Openads, and to link Openads into larger infrastructures.

Please let us know your feedback, suggestions, or ways you would like to get involved.