Documentation
AFFILIATE AD ROTATOR: V1.0
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
Zip File for this program and
save it to your desktop.
- Unpack the tar archive on your desktop using a
program that unpacks Zip Files. If you don't have such a program then download
WINZIP FREE from SHAREWARE.COM.
- After you have unpacked the
Zip 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/adv/configure.cgi and
/cgi-bin/adv/admin/configure.cgi)
- mysqldatabasename = "your mysql database name";
- $mysqlusername="your mysql username";
- $mysqlpassword="your mysql password";
- $targetclickthrough="http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/adv/clickthrough.cgi";
- $cgidir = "/cgi-bin/adv";
Pretty self explanatory I hope.
$cgidir btw is NOT the FULL PATH to the /cgi-bin/adv directory NO - its JUST the
RELATIVE URL - you will not need to change this probably.
Upload Your Edited CGI and Database Files
- Upload all of the cgi files (.cgi) into a
directory you create called "adv" inside your cgi-bin
- Upload adv.cgi, clickthrough.cgi,
configure.cgi, and userstats.cgi into /cgi-bin/adv/
- Make a directory inside of your /cgi-bin/adv
folder called admin and the files inside of the cgibin/admin directory after you unpack
the tarball and upload add.cgi, configure.cgi, delete.cgi, getinfo.cgi, modify.cgi,
reset.cgi, stats.cgi, and view.cgi into here.
- Make a directory inside of your normal
webspace (http://www.yourdomain.com/adv) called adv and inside of here create a directory
called "admin" and another called "webmasters". If you want
affiliates to be able to check stats they can login through the
http://www.yourdomain.com/adv/webmasters/index.html page. Otherwise you wont use
that page at all.
- Make another directory inside of
http://www.yourdomain.com/adv/admin/ (called admin.. duh) and upload the admin index.html
page. This is the page you will use to add affiliates, check stats, and do what you
need to.
- Password protect both the /cgi-bin/adv/admin/
and http://www.yourdomain.com/adv/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.
About adding banners
- When you add a new affilaite account you have
to specify the URL (i.e. begins with http) of the banner image. If you are serving
your own banners then you have to FTP the banners somewhere obviously.
Operating your Banner Program
There really isn't much to it. Install
the system. Enter all the info for your affiliate programs into the rotator.
Take a look at the file (bannercode.html) to see the javascript code you will need to
insert in any and all pages you want to display ads. You can place the bannercode on
any page even on another server.
The bannercode is below...
<script
language=JavaScript1.2
src=http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/adv/adv.cgi></script>
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