OpenX Blog

One clear message from the recent OpenX Community Survey was that we need to do more to make the ad server simpler to use. Addressing this has become a key focus for us, and in coming releases you will see the results of this ongoing work.

The OpenX ad server, with its broad range of features, is used by publishers in many different ways. We’re focusing on three key areas to simplify the product so that those features are much easier to use:

• Make OpenX simpler to learn and use
• Streamline workflow for common tasks
• Remove the need to install and maintain an ad server

Under the hood… a new UI framework
Making OpenX easier to use and streamlining the workflow hinges on improving the user interface - a UI that was designed 8 years ago!

To make these big changes we first had to improve the UI framework. We’ve developed a new system that will allow developers and administrators to control the user interface. For example, features that aren’t being used could be hidden, and new functionality added.

OpenX 2.7 will make these features available through the new plugin framework. Please register to help us develop these features.

UI improvements in the new version of OpenX
With the release of OpenX 2.6 (currently in beta) you will see the first round of UI improvements. Some of these are intended to make OpenX more intuitive, and we’ve updated terminology and reworked pages to make the administrative interface simpler and more logical. Other improvements will make it easier to navigate around the application and perform common tasks more quickly.

Probably the most visible change will be the new OpenX dashboard. This is a new concept suggested by the community: a place where you can see, at a glance, key statistics about your ad server. Although the dashboard is still in its first phase, future releases will build on its framework to enable users to add widgets and further customise it to meet their needs.

A hosted version of OpenX
We know that many publishers who use OpenX to serve ads would prefer not to maintain an ad server. So, as part of our effort to make OpenX simpler to use we decided to provide a hosted version of OpenX. We announced the hosted beta programme earlier this year, and we’re excited about the hundreds of publishers who are already participating. We’re continually working to expand the programme by including more publishers. Please let us know if you would like to participate, too.

This is a work in progress - keep sending in your suggestions
We’re still working hard to make OpenX as simple as possible. We want to save you time so you can focus on optimising your inventory, display more relevant ads and maximize your ad revenue. In the next few releases of OpenX you will see more and more of our work in this area. We’ve had some great contributions from the community and many suggestions have already been implemented. Please keep sending in your suggestions or join the OpenX feedback group and help us make OpenX simpler and easier to use.

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Related links
Send us your feedback
Join the OpenX feedback group
Register to help test the hosted version of OpenX

The complete translation of the 2.5 beta into 11 languages has been contributed by our community. We have had many volunteers step up and accept the challenge of translating it into their native tongues. They turned out to be the right people for the job too! We all owe them our thanks for their fantastic work!

Please meet:

• Aby, Daniel, Ernesto (Spanish)
• Benjy (French)
• Heiko (German)
• Max, Damir (Russian)
• Rafael, Paulo (Brazilian Portuguese)
• Ling, Scourgen (Chinese Simplified)
• Luca, Pierluigi (Italian)
• Aleš (Slovenian)
• Marius (Romanian)
• Norio, Tomoaki, Kenji (Japanese)
• Krzysztof (Polish)

These guys refused to get intimidated by the massive number of words (over 9,000!) and sped through the task. The award for the fastest translator would have to go to Marius and Aleš who had to start from scratch yet progressed at incredible pace, sometimes reaching 20% a day. Then there are those like Norio, Luca and Pierluigi who mysteriously committed translations at some extraordinary hours, and those who got involved last minute, like Daniel, Ernesto and Paulo, yet gave it all they had. Finally, our thanks go to those who have been part of the translation team for a long time and who we can always rely on: Aby, Benjy, Heiko, Max, Rafael, Ling, Scourgen, and Krzysztof. Well done guys!

Special thanks to all of those translators who have put in so much effort to complete these language updates. They worked hard to make it happen and we hope you will benefit from this.

And we have more good stuff to come your way! More and more volunteers get involved into our localisation project. We have volunteers working on Lithuanian, Danish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Arabic and many more. If you feel you want to join and contribute please register here and we will get in touch.

Thank you guys!

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Related links:
Check out our translation progress.

The new version of OpenX introduces some major enhancements to user management, including more fine grained control of individual user permissions and logging of trafficking changes.

These new features will be of particular interest if you more than one person logs into your ad server. For example:

• Website owners, who may let advertisers log to see live statistics, and
• Networks and agencies, who may have many people involved in trafficking.

In previous versions of OpenX, the management of users and accounts system was simple and effective so long as it fitted well with your needs, but this was restrictive. An Advertiser or Publisher (website owner) could be given access to login to the ad server to and view reports and statistics. All trafficking was done by the administrator or special “Agency” level accounts.

This presented some challenges. It was often necessary to have multiple people sharing the same username and password in order to access the system since login credentials were associated with a specific account including the Administrator account, as well as each Agency, Advertiser or Publisher account.

We have implemented a more sophisticated user permissions system in order to provide a hosted version of OpenX, and we’re excited to be able to share the results of this work as part of the new version of our open source ad server (currently in beta).

Introducing the new OpenX user management system…
The new features are the introduction of user and accounts, with a permissions system to give users specific permissions to control advertisers or websites as well as a complete audit trail of all trafficking changes.

1. Give each individual user their own login details
This is the first and most obvious change to the system, by giving each user their own login details we’ve made the permissions system act much more like a traditional user management system. This also means that all trafficking actions can be logged against the user who made the change rather than a shared account.

2. Control what each user account can see and do
The new user accounts are more flexible because permissions are no longer directly associated with a single advertiser or publisher. This means you can give a trafficker access to control many websites and advertisers (called a Manager Account) while giving other users more restricted permissions.

3. Set specific permissions on a user account basis
The new system gives better control over permissions to create, modify and update actions by setting these properties for each user account individually.

4. View the history of configuration changes
The new auditing system lets you see a history of all configuration changes which will be a great help in troubleshooting delivery problems back to the cause.

5. Switch between ‘accounts’
Users can switch between the different accounts they are associated with. This affects what they see on the administrative interface, for example switching to the Administrator Account to make global configuration changes and then back to a Manager Account to perform trafficking tasks.

We think these new features will be of great interest to anyone who delegates trafficking campaigns, giving them more control over their ad server. You can find out more about the new user management tools in the user and administrator guides.

• The new User Guide includes information about users and accounts
• The new Administrator Guide includes details about managing users.

Update: We’ve updated the terminology in this article for clarity around key terms (users, accounts, administrator, manager, advertiser, trafficker.

Last week, in the German advertising hub of Cologne, we hosted the second OpenX seminar. The event drew a healthy crowd of publishers, networks and consultants keen to learn about the OpenX ad server and our future plans, and to network with other OpenX community members.

The event was presented in an “unconference” format, meaning that we tailored the content to suit the feedback from our participants. After some introductory sessions, including a tour of the new ad server and a sneak peak at some of the new features we’re working on (like the new Plugin Framework), we turned our attention to some suggested topics, in particular scalability and performance tuning.

Some of our key community members were kind enough to help run the event. Our thanks go out to community consultants Tobias Schwarz and Heiko Weber for all their hard work, and in particular for running the session on scalability and performance tuning.

We were excited that two of OpenX’s founding community members were able to travel over from The Netherlands to participate in the event. Those who attended had a chance to meet with Niels Leenheer, one of the original maintainers of phpAdsNew and who is now working to improve the OpenX UI, and Erik Geurts, who is one of the most active forum moderators and an independent consultant.

Finally, we’d like to thank everyone who attended the event - we really hope you found it useful. Please send us feedback to help us improve.

With two successful events so far - in Ancona, Italy and Cologne, Germany - we now hope to make it happen in the next most popular choice, California.

Register for the OpenX seminar in Pasadena here.

The OpenX team has released an update to the beta version of the OpenX ad server.

This release (v2.5.70 beta) introduces bug fixes and incorporates some significant updates to translations. We’ve updated 11 languages with a full set of translation strings for the 2.5 beta, including:

• Brazilian Portuguese
• French
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Polish
• Romanian
• Russian
• Simplified Chinese
• Slovenian
• Spanish

Special thanks to all our community translators who have put in so much effort to complete these language updates and to all the other translators busily working on other language updates.

See the release notes for more details or download the latest OpenX beta today!

The 4th of July is approaching fast and we’d like to update you on what’s happening at next week’s OpenX Seminar in Cologne. There’s been a lot of interest and we’re really happy we have had lots of submissions on what you want to hear about.

The session will start with an introduction on OpenX, a tour of the new stable version of the OpenX ad server (currently in beta) and our roadmap. In the afternoon we’re going to go into details based on the topics proposed by participants including scalability and performance. We’ll finish up with a Q&A session with a panel of experts.

If you’re coming you’ll get to meet Simon Bailey, our Senior Product Manager, who will talk you through 2.6 demo, roadmap and plugins. Simon has a comprehensive knowledge of OpenX and future product developments.

Heiko Weber and Tobias Schwarz, active community members and OpenX consultants, will be joining us on stage to discuss scalability and performance. You may know Heiko and Tobias from our German forum and from their work as OpenX consultants.

They say the devil is in the detail so here’s some useful info:

• Location: KonferenzZentrum – Plenum 2,
  Josef-Lammerting-Allee 17-21, 50933 Köln (directions)
• Date: Friday, 04/07/2008
• Time: 10:00-16:00

Please take a moment to register if you are planning on coming.

We hope to see you there!

OpenX are developing a series of content management system plugins to make it easier for web publishers to integrate OpenX into their websites and we are ready to start private beta testing for the Drupal and Wordpress plugins.

Register to help test the Drupal and Wordpress plugins.

We’re expecting a lot of responses so please be patient. We will get back to everyone within the next few weeks.

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Related links:
Tell us what other CMS plugins we should develop.
Wanted: Joomla! publishers to help test an OpenX module

The OpenX team has released an update to our open source ad server.

This release (v2.4.7) resolves 23 bugs including improved delivery performance when using companion positioning and fixes to campaign delivery and campaign analysis reporting.

Find out more from the release notes, or download the latest version of OpenX today.

The OpenX team has released an update to the beta version of our open source ad server.

This release (v2.5.69 beta) resolves a security vulnerability and includes over 70 other bug fixes and enhancements. As always, we’d like to send out our thanks to everyone who has helped us to identify and resolve issues.

See the release notes for more details or download the latest OpenX beta today!

The OpenX team will be in Palo Alto (United States) next week and we’d like to use the opportunity to meet with some of our publishers and to run a focus group on one of our current projects.

Focus group
We’re looking for feedback for a group web publishers about a project we’re currently working on.

What: OpenX publisher focus group
When: Thursday 12th June, 5:00pm (TBC)
Where: Palo Alto

Please email us if you are able to participate and tell us a little about yourself, your business and how you are using OpenX. We’ll pick publishers on a first come, first serve basis so act quickly!

Dinner and drinks
After the session we’ll be heading out for dinner and drinks and would be pleased to meet up with OpenX community members. This will be a nice chance to meet some members of the OpenX Team as well as other like minded people with an interest in OpenX.

What: OpenX dinner and drinks
When: Thursday 12th June, 7:30pm (TBC)
Where: Palo Alto

Please email us if you’d like to attend and we’ll send you an email confirming details.

kind regards,
The OpenX Team

PS. Please feel free to send this invitation on if you know other web publishers in or around Palo Alto who might be interested in attending.