Manually going through Joomla Banners

Need to make sure that the affiliate code is working

[cmendla]

I've been playing with the standard Joomla 1.5.x banners. One of the things I'm doing is putting specific products from a specific affiliate program. (Not sure if I can memtion the affiliate or even if it matters.). The affiliate code pulls in the image and the appropriate links. It seems to work pretty well.

I'm cherry picking about a dozen or so items for each site.

The problem I have is that I know that eventually the items will no longer be available. I don't have any easy way of validating that the code is still pointing to a valid item.

What I'm trying to do is find a way to simply cycle through the existing banners to see if they are showing the products correctly so I can identify and remove obselete products. I've looked through the banner management products in the joomla extensions but havent found anything that looks like it could work.

I think I could probably do a loadposition for an administrator only article and make one call for each banner. That isn't ideal but it might work. I'm looking for something a bit easier.

thanks

chris

[ergophobe]

Do you mean to automatically check or just cycle through and do a visual check yourself?

If you mean the later, I just took the script portion that cycles through the banners, but instead of randomizing, it iterates through all of them and displays them all on a "test-banner.php" page. This can even be on your local machine. Then put a heading above each one and you just scroll down for ones that are broken.

[cmendla]

ergophobe - Thanks. I'll take a look at the code.

What I figured out the other day as a temporary fix was to install a banner carousel extension that lets me visually check the banners to see if they are still working correctly. I set it up so it's only visible to registered users which works for the way the sites are now.

As soon as I can, I'll look at the script you mentioned for the banner code. It should be easy enough to tweak it the way you mentioned.


thanks again.

chris

[ergophobe]

Chris,

presumably you have either a list of urls or a way to generate them by a simple algo.

So in my case, my banner rotator is simply based on an array of values that get randomized. So for my verification script, I simply iterate through the array, instead of picking a random element in the array. It's just a couple of lines.