In 1998 Tobias Ratschiller created phpMyAdmin, a tool to administer MySQL
databases, written in PHP. After the launch of phpwizard.net, the home
of the phpMyAdmin project, more projects were added, like phpIRC, phpChat,
phpPolls and phpAds.
PhpAds started out as a free tool, which let developers place banners
on their website. The code was released under the GPL licence and a whole
community of users grew around this wonderful piece of software. After
about a year and four releases the project was abandoned because Tobias
didn't have the time to continue working on it.
Meanwhile phpAds had really become a popular solution. People were asking
for new features and started fixing the still existing bugs. Because the
development on phpAds wasn't controlled by anyone anymore Wim Godden decided
it was time to breath life again in the old phpAds project. PhpAdsNew
was born, a new project, based on the old phpAds source code.
Wim started working on improving the old source code, adding new features
and fixing the remaining issues. PhpAds 1.4 grew into phpAdsNew 1.5 and
kept evolving into phpAdsNew 1.8. Because the time involved to maintain
a project like phpAdsNew Wim asked for developers to help him improve
phpAdsNew. A number of other developers like Phil Hord and Niels Leenheer
joined the project and added their own new features. After the release
of phpAdsNew 1.9 the developers really felt the project lacked a number
of features which prevented the project becoming a mature ad server.
Niels took it upon him to lead the development of phpAdsNew 2. The goals
for phpAdsNew 2 were very high and a lot of work was spend on rewriting
the code to make it more stable and implementing the features that were
really essential for any serious ad server. With the help of a lot of
developers all kinds of new features were added and a completely new user
interface was developed. There are just too many changes in phpAdsNew
to completely list them here. Halfway during the development of phpAdsNew
2 Matteo Beccati created a PostgreSQL port of phpAdsNew and joined the
project to help us. Later on Stefan Morgenroth joined the project and
contributed his own continuation of the phpAds project, called phpAdsPlus.
A number of features found in phpAdsPlus, such as Flash support, were
still missing in phpAdsNew and they were quickly adapted for phpAdsNew.
After 8 months and 6 beta versions it was decided to work towards the
final release of phpAdsNew 2. This doesn't mean the development of phpAdsNew
is coming to an end. Beta 7 will be the last 2.0 beta, but we are already
planning new additions and great new features.
What can you expect from us in the future?
With the release of phpAdsNew 2 we think we have the basic requirements
for a mature ad server, and this is the main thing we are focussing on
right now. After this very important milestone we can build on these basic
features and create an even better solution. It is too early to give a
complete feature list for the next major release of phpAdsNew but there
are some things we want to work on in the future. Traditionally phpAdsNew
is written to be deployed on only one website. This doesn't mean the current
release isn't able to server ads for multiple websites, but it isn't optimised
for this purpose. This is one of the things we want to change in the next
major release. In addition to this we want to introduce more advanced
features like user sessions which allow use to target users individually
and much much more.
Stay tuned!
Also a final note: Wim, Phil, Niels, Matteo and Stefan are not the only
developers who worked on this piece of software. PhpAdsNew wouldn't the
same without all the code contributed by a large number of other developers.
Thanks to everyone who helped make this project possible, you know who
you are. Also many thanks to Tobias Ratschiller who started all of this,
without his early work on phpAds this project would probably not exist.
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