OpenX Blog

Now that we have released 2.7 beta, it is time to kick our translations efforts into high gear. In the past month, we have completed 6 new languages. In the next week, I am hoping that we can complete all the languages that are more than 50% complete:

• Danish
• Dutch
• Italian
• Japanese
• Lithuanian
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Portuguese (Portugal)
• Romanian
• Russian

As you may have heard, there is a lot riding on this - we are giving away Official OpenX Translator T-shirts, some blog love, and other goodies (perhaps, to a lucky winner, The Amazing OpenX!)

The OpenX community is truly international, and we really want our product to reflect our global status.

So - get to work!

As you probably know, we’ve recently built a number of major new features into the OpenX Ad Server and we’re excited to let you know that they are now available in the OpenX 2.7 Beta release.

Here’s what you’ll get with this new release:

• Plugin Framework — With plugins, you can easily extend OpenX functionality in a variety of different areas. A number of plugins are already under development by OpenX as well as various community members.

• OpenX Market — Through the new OpenX Market plugin, which is included in this release, you will be able to participate in OpenX Market seamlessly within the Ad Server. OpenX Market enables you to maximize your ad revenue by letting advertisers bid competitively to show their ads on your site.

• UI Improvements — We’ve updated the user interface to improve the workflow and look-and-feel of the product. Check out the new navigation menus and easier to use inventory management screens.

• Improved Scalability — Thanks to a new and improved data logging architecture, you will be able to more easily scale your ad server.

As you get started using OpenX 2.7 Beta, please send us your feedback to help us as we develop our stable OpenX 2.8 version. Stay tuned for more exciting news coming soon…

Are you new to the world of online advertising? Interested in learning more about the basics of ad serving and everything that OpenX has to offer? If so, then check out our new Getting Started with OpenX video tutorial. This five-minute tutorial takes you on a screen-by-screen tour of the OpenX ad server and shows how you can get started with serving your first ads. It’s a great way to quickly get up to speed with the basics of OpenX, so that you can move on to utilizing even more of OpenX’s powerful and customizable ad serving technology.  This translates into earning more and more revenue from your online advertising. Why wait?

To serve our vast and growing community of more than 150,000 websites across the web, we’re continually working on additional help resources, including video tutorials like this one. Pretty soon, we’ll be publishing video tutorials on topics like getting started with OpenX Market, using the plugin framework and more. If you have suggestions for video tutorial subjects, please contact us with your ideas!

One of my pet projects over the last few weeks has been to build a simple advertising management platform for Wordpress. OpenX has dabbled in this arena before, and has built a plug-in which will easily integrate with OpenX Hosted or Downloaded versions.

However, most users of Wordpress do not need a full featured ad server for their blog. So, we decided to build an entirely separate plug-in which serves ads on its own. We have worked with Mutube, the writer of the very excellent Adsense Manager plug-in, to provide the base to our Wordpress plug-in. The plug-in has the following features:

• Automatic detection of over 10 3rd party ad networks and adservers, including Adsense, CJ, OpenX and others
• Simple UI which integrates completely in Wordpress
• Support for older versions of Wordpress, as well as the newest release, v2.7
• Ability to rotate multiple ads in ad zones
• Ability to optimise your ad networks by modifying the weight (% of time they show), and ability to allow ad networks to compete with the OpenX Market for the highest eCPM
• Easily place ads within blog posts, or in your WP templates
• Many more features which make this an incredibly useful tool for your blog!

Advertising Manager for Wordpress is currently being beta tested by a few trusted folks. We are looking for a few others who would be willing to test the plug-in, and give feedback. Hopefully, we can then release Advertising Manager for Wordpress Beta very shortly.

Please PM me or respond in the comments if you are willing to help!

Advertising Manager in Wordpress v2.6

A list screen in Advertising Manager using Wordpress 2.7

An edit screen of Advertising Manager in Wordpress 2.7