Redmine › Advertising

Download Advertising 0.2.1

There was a minor issue with usage of the Advertising plugin under Redmine 2.5.x. And it was quite insignificant – anyway, I have fixed it.

A much more severe issue was that Redmine sometimes crashed, if the plugin was installed! Thus, it crashed, when a big image was uploaded into an advertisement and when an attempt to... copy a project was made.

Both these issues were found by Minh Thien, who also tracked one of them down. Thanks, Minh!

So, the main reason for this release to come are fixes of these two issues.

Download Advertising 0.2.0

This is my last already released active plugin, which finally got support for Redmine 2.x (there is also Project Settings, which I have abandoned, and 5 other plugins, which have not been released yet). So, in other words, this is a big milestone, which makes all of my Redmine plugins up-to-date (so you can congratulate me)! Henceforth I will do my best not to let them get so much outdated again...

So, as I have said, this release comes with support for newer Redmine versions, which are 1.4.x (currently used by stable Debian and Ubuntu), 2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.2.x and 2.3.x. These are the main reasons for this release to happen. But there are also others:

I used the Reklama plugin, in particular, to advertise my book about Redmine. Then googling for the book (e.g., reviews) I figured out, that most of search results are pointing to pages of my own site and to that ad... Needless to say that it was an awful effect! So it became clear, that ads must be made hidden from search engines in some way. I investigated several options (see #2146) but JavaScript ads appeared to be the best workaround. So since version 0.2.0 all ads are added to pages using JavaScript. This deployment method has another advantage – your ads will be shown only to clients with JavaScript enabled, what means, that no bots will see your ads any more, i.e., number of hits will more likely contain the number of times the ad has been actually shown to humans.

Another new feature is related to the issue #1847, in which Pierluigi Soana requests an icon to be added to the top menu. This was implemented as support for Redmine themes. Thus the icon is added in the classic.css file, which gets loaded only, when the Classic theme is enabled in Redmine. The similar was implemented in the red-andy.css for my Red-Andy theme – this file makes ads in the list (which becomes available, when you click “Advertisement” in the top menu) look like they were on the sidebar.

In addition this release comes with the Portuguese and Turkish translations (thanks Mario Luzeiro and Ismail SEZEN) and some other small bug fixes.

If you used the SVN repository of the project, you need to update the SVN repository path as it has been changed (along with the identifier of this project):

$ svn switch --relocate http://svn.s-andy.com/redmine-advertising http://svn.s-andy.com/advertising

While I did not plan to extend the plugin much since the first release each time I felt like missing some functionality I created an issue or just implemented it. This resulted into the new version of the plugin providing much more control on what, where and whom to show...

For example,

• I needed to disable an advertisement for some time without removing it. Now the advertisements listing and the form have this new option...
• I wanted to put a Ukrainian advertisement but did not want to show it for people who do not speak Ukrainian. Now it’s possible to specify language...
• I wanted to disable some of advertisements for some projects. Another user also wanted this! Now the form has been extended and contains project selection...

For this release I want to thank:

• Txinto Vaz for translation to Spanish!
• Pierluigi Soana for feedback and ideas!

New version can be downloaded here.
For upgrade instructions check this page.