Documentation
BANNER GATE: V2.0
System Requirements
Preliminaries
- Determine the path to PERL 5 on your web
server host. Note that some web hosting companies run both PERL 4 and PERL 5.
Make ABSOLUTELY sure you are not setting this up under PERL 4. Ask your
administrator if you are not sure.
- Download the tarfile for this program and
save it to your desktop.
- Unpack the tar archive on your desktop using a
program that unpacks UNIX TAR ARCHIVES. If you don't have such a program then download
WINZIP FREE from SHAREWARE.COM.
- After you have unpacked the TAR archive you
will have a collection of folders and files on your desktop. Now you have to do some
basic editing of each of these files (or at least some of them). Use a text editor
such as wordpad, notepad, BBEdit, simpletext, or teachtext to edit the files. These
are NOT WORD PROCESSOR DOCUMENTS they are just simple TEXT files so don't save them as
word processor documents or save them with extentions such as .txt or they will NOT WORK.
Note that there may be a some files inside of folders which are "blank".
This is normal.
Preparing the CGI scripts
Define Path To PERL 5
The first step is to open up each and every
file that has a .cgi extention and edit line number one of each script. Each of the
cgi scripts is written in perl 5. For your scripts to run they must know where perl 5 is
installed on your web server. The path to perl 5 is defined to a cgi script in the first
line of the file. In each of the cgi scripts the first line of code looks something like
this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
If the path to perl 5 on your web server is
different from /usr/bin/perl you must edit the first line of each cgi script to reflect
the correct path. If the path to perl 5 is the same no changes are necessary. If you do
not know the path to perl 5 ask the webmaster or system administrator at your server site.
Create database and upload the .sql
file
Upload the .sql file into your mysql database
(review mysql tutorial) if you do not
know how, or better yet - bug your isp and get them to do it.
Configure the .cgi files
configure.cgi
This file pretty much runs the whole
show. If you screw this one up don't count on anything working properly. In
other words, make sure you take the time to do this step CORRECTLY. Ask your
administrator if you need to. Below are the variables used in ALL of the other cgi
scripts. All of the other cgi programs USE configure.cgi to figure out where certain
things are. You will use TWO COPIES of configure.cgi to run this system. They
are the EXACT SAME FILE - just TWO COPIES (/cgi-bin/banner/configure.cgi and
/cgi-bin/banner/admin/configure.cgi)
- $admin = "you\@yourdomain.com";
- $mailprogram = "/path/to/sendmail";
- $mysqldatabasename = "name of your mysql database";
- $mysqlusername="your mysql password";
- $mysqlpassword="your mysql username";
- $destination = "http://www.yourdomain.com/";
clickthrough url
$imagefile =
"/full/path/to/cgi-bin/bannergate/images/banner.gif"; full path to your banner
$threshold = 1500; number of unique clicks required for free account
$cgidir = "/cgi-bin/bannergate"; URI of bannergate cgi files
$deadaccounttolerance = 10; not used in this version (ignore)
$emails =
"/full/path/to/cgi-bin/bannergate/admin/emails"; path to email files
$adduser =
"http://www.yourdomain.com/location/of/your/adminpanel/to/add/users/manually/";
URL of your password site
admin panel if you have one.
Upload Your Edited CGI and Database Files
- Upload all of the cgi files (.cgi) into a
directory you create called "bannergate" inside cgi-bin/bannergate/
- Make a directory inside of your
/cgi-bin/bannergate folder called admin and the files inside of the cgibin/admin directory
after you unpack the tarball and upload the rest of the cgi files into here.
- Make a directory inside of your normal
webspace (http://www.yourdomain.com/bannergate) called bannergate and upload index.html
(the login page) here.
- Make another directory inside of
http://www.yourdomain.com/bannergate/admin/ (called admin.. duh) and upload the admin
index.html page.
- Make another directory inside your webspace
http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/bannergate/images/ to store your banner
- Password protect both the
/cgi-bin/bannergate/admin/ and http://www.yourdomain.com/bannergate/admin/ directories
with .htaccess. Read the tutorial section
if you don't already know how to do this.
Chmod the files
- Chmod all the .cgi files to 755.
Upload Your Banner(s)
- You have to upload the banner files by ftp (as
BINARY DATA) to the images directory when you are going to create an account.