OpenX Blog

On April 4th in Ancona, Italy we will hold a full day OpenX seminar in association with ANSO.

The seminar is free and open to publishers, bloggers, journalists, webmaster and pretty much anyone who is interested in online advertising.

We will have few product demos and tutorials which will show on the brand new OpenX hosted version.

The OpenX team attending is:
Melany Libraro – Marketing Director
Simon Bailey – Senior Product Manager
Matteo Beccati – Senior Developer

To see the program of the event please visit: www.anso.it (in italian)

Over the last few months, we have spent time sorting through all of the opportunities, features, and priorities that we have, and distilling these down to a clear roadmap of what OpenX plans to deliver in the coming months. It took a lot of time to deliver a simple result.

Here are the priorities for OpenX in 2008:

Stability
Our current version of OpenX, v2.4, is the first stable release since the release of phpAdsNew in 2002. Almost everything (except the interface!) has changed. We need to work on making the core OpenX server as stable as ever. We currently have about 120 outstanding bugs, and more unverified bugs from the forums that we are making a top priority to get resolved. (UPDATE: v2.4 has around 25 outstanding bugs, and the remainder are bugs for v2.5 beta)

Simplicity
Over the years, we have added many new features to an already full-featured product. We are working on moving many of the more ‘expert’ features to be optional plug-ins (check out the ‘Integration’ section below), as well as modifying the user interface and workflow to be as simple and efficient as possible. Our efforts simplifying (or eliminating) installation or upgrade fall into this category as well.

Integration
There are many people who leverage OpenX by customizing the code to work within their other systems (e.g. CMS, CRM, Financial, etc.). The problem with customizing the core code is that upgrading OpenX becomes harder when new versions are released. We have identified features which will make integration and customization of OpenX easier, including a Web Services API, Plugin Framework, and Template System.

The goal here is to make it very simple for anyone to create modifications to OpenX - and to donate their work back to the OpenX community!

Efficiency
Over the last few years, we have successfully scaled OpenX to serve many billions of ads per month. However, the infrastructure required to do this is quite complicated. We want to decrease the resources (servers, disk space, etc.) required to serve large ad volumes, as well as simplify the infrastructure needed in order to scale to huge volumes.

Why are these things important to us?
We would like to prepare OpenX for the next level - to make a solid foundation for the OpenX community to build upon. We will then become the platform for publishers, big and small, with simple or sophisticated needs, to use to manage their online advertising.

Please let us know if we are on the right track. Stay tuned for more specifics on features.

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.

Today we announced a version of our ad server that is hosted. What this means is that a publisher will have the option to use Openads without downloading and installing on their own web server. This will be useful for small publishers, who do not have the time, money, or expertise to use the downloaded version. Equally, large publishers may prefer a hosted version of Openads if they do not want to configure a server cluster that will handle large amounts of traffic.

Obviously this is a gigantic effort - there are more websites using Openads than all other ad servers combined. If even a small percentage of our community chooses a hosted version rather than a downloaded version, we will be serving billions of ads per day. The planning involved with this has been in the works for months.

What does this mean for publishers?

• Choice. Publishers will now be able to choose between a downloaded and hosted version of our ad server. Openads will continue to provide a download version of our ad server.
• Open. Openads will continue to be open source, licensed under the GPL.
• Free. Both the downloaded and hosted version of Openads will be FREE.

We are starting to roll out our hosted product at the end of January. During the first couple of months, the service will be in private beta, and we will be opening the beta to more and more publishers throughout 2008. If you would like to sign up for the private beta process, please sign up here.

Please realise that it will take some time for us to roll out the beta across our entire community. I encourage you to continue to download and install Openads - we will keep you up to date and invite you to join in with beta testing as soon as we are able.

I cannot emphasise enough how much I appreciate our team’s effort in preparing for a hosted version. I also thank everyone in the Openads community for using Openads, and for continuing to give us feedback so we can make our products better.

Thanks,
Scott

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Related articles:
Openads announces $15.5M funding and a free hosted ad server

We’ve completed the maintenance work. The Openads Community Forum is back up and running.

Thanks for your patience.

– The Openads Team

The Openads Community Forum will be available in read-only mode this morning while we’re undertaking some maintenance work. We expect the work will be completed in the next few hours.

We apologise for any inconvenience and will do our best to have everything up and running as soon as possible.

We will update this blog post to confirm that the work has been completed successfully.
– The Openads Team

As 2007 draws to an end, the Openads team are packing their bags and heading off on a short break. Next week we’ll all be off visiting loved ones, relaxing, overindulging and generally recharging our batteries in preparation for what promises to be an action-packed 2008.

Between now and the new year only the most dedicated Openads staff will be checking emails and responding to questions on the forum. Please be patient with any questions you have - we’ll be back up to full speed in the first week of January.

2007 was an amazing year for us here at Openads. Our thanks go out to everyone in the Openads Community who has contributed in any way. We wanted to send out a special thanks to some of our most active Openads Forum contributors including (in no particular order): GoleyC, Erik Geurts, Hieko Webber, PAN_chriss, uwe.ha, Jochen Witte and scriptsservice. Thanks guys, you’ve made a big difference to so many Openads publishers.

Enjoy the holiday everyone. We look forward to working with you in the new year - it should be a very exciting one!

I am very pleased to announce that, as of yesterday, over 10,000 publishers are using the latest Openads stable release (2.4). In the space of just 3 month we have reached this exciting milestone with publishers upgrading from the older releases and new publishers turning to Openads to manage their online advertising.

We’ve had some great feedback on the new release of Openads so far:

Andy is right, Openads is very powerful and we need to make it as simple as possible. We are working to improve usability and add other important features which you have been asking for. We’re already busily working on the next big release of Openads.

We’d like to send out our thanks to everyone for your continuing enthusiasm and interest in Openads. We promise to keep focused and bring you the best tools to help you make more money from online advertising.

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 update to let you all know that our SVN/Trac server is about to move to a new hosting centre. The outage should be no more than a couple of hours.

Over the next few months we’re going to work to make the Openads interface and workflow better. We’re starting by reviewing the Openads UI and the first step is some interviews with Openads users.

We need your help! We are looking for passionate Openads users who are willing to participate in a paid one-on-one interview about the Openads UI in London.

To participate you will need to be in London and available for an interview on one of the following dates:

• Thursday 17th August
• Friday 18th August
• Monday 21st August
• Tuesday 22nd August

To register your interest fill in this quick questionnaire