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WordPress Widgets: Ad Rotator

Posted by Dmytro Shteflyuk on under WordPress

Automattic has released fine plugin for WordPress — WordPress Widgets which can be used to personalize your blog without knowing HTML. You don’t need to edit your WordPress theme at all! Just choose required widget, drag and drop it to sidebar. There are many widgets already created by different developers which you can use on your blog.

I failed to find widget which can get several chunks of HTML code and show one of them on sidebar therefor I decided to create it myself. You can download Ad Rotator plugin, then you need to unpack, copy adrotator.php to your BLOG_DIR/wp-content/plugins/widgets/ directory and activate it on Plugins page.

You can see the sample on this blog: there are several of my favourite books from Amazon on sidebar, and only one of them is shown at time.

Edit window looks like following:

Ad Rotator edit window

You can enter title of the your widget, and HTML-code to display. Different chunks are separated with <--more--> code.

Download

You could always download latest version of the plugin here.

49 Responses to this entry

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SridhaReena: Homepage of Sridhar and Reena
said on May 12th, 2006 at 11:15 · Permalink

[…] Dmytro Shteflyuk’s Home » Blog Archive » WordPress Widgets: Ad Rotator “I failed to find widget which can get several chunks of HTML code and show one of them on sidebar therefor I decided to create it myself” (tags: rotator plugin wordpress widgets) […]

Sri’s Blog » links for 2006-05-10
said on May 16th, 2006 at 01:18 · Permalink

[…] Dmytro Shteflyuk’s Home » Blog Archive » WordPress Widgets: Ad Rotator “I failed to find widget which can get several chunks of HTML code and show one of them on sidebar therefor I decided to create it myself” (tags: rotator plugin wordpress widgets) […]

Totem
said on June 6th, 2006 at 19:21 · Permalink

I think after installing the widget you should explain how else to go forward as there is no documentation after that.

I installed the widget and activated it in WP and there is no title nor link where i can add banners and such.

mark
said on June 8th, 2006 at 16:15 · Permalink

hey there, great plugin! it works great. quick question though. i’d like to run multiple of this widget simultaneiously, but when i rename the widget, upload, and activate it, i get a “can’t redeclare” error in php.

is there any way to run a few of these at the same time???

thanks!
mark

mark
said on June 8th, 2006 at 16:23 · Permalink

nevermind my moronic question, just saw at the bottom of the page the “how many ad rotator widgets do you want?” question.

sorry..

Kpumuk
said on June 14th, 2006 at 08:13 · Permalink

Totem: Do you have the WordPress Widgets plugin installed? Ad Rotator is a widget for this plugin and it can’t work without WordPress Widgets.

When you have installed Ad Rotator you can see it in the list of available widgets. Just drag and drop it to your sidebar and enter ads. Pretty simple, isn’t it?

Steffen
said on July 18th, 2006 at 00:46 · Permalink

Nice widget – and it works :)
The next step would be a “category sensitive” ad displa for the sidebar, so one could choose which ad(s) to display separately for each the category.
I think those Amazon links would do better if they’d they match the post’s category (i.e. books about programming in a blog category named Developement and Dilbert books in My Life ;) – yeah, that would be some great widget that I’d be willing to pay for as well ;)
Keep it up!

Grant W. Laird, Jr. Blog » Wordpress Plugins
said on August 14th, 2006 at 04:49 · Permalink

[…] Ad-Rotator – If you have any ad banner (can be used for other things) – this should do just fine for you. If you have Google Adsense account, you can just post codes into Widgets text box.  […]

ewan
said on August 22nd, 2006 at 11:52 · Permalink

Hello,

Fantastic little widget! Works very well.

I was just thinking, for ease of use is there anyway it could be set to link to and rotate a WordPress post?

Kpumuk
said on September 25th, 2006 at 13:48 · Permalink

Hello, ewan
Currenly it’s impossible, but no so hard to implement. If you need this futurem, I can help you

Bloggy Tutorials » Adsense and plugins for your blog
said on September 26th, 2006 at 14:16 · Permalink

[…] Ad Rotator Widget For those who are using the widgets plugin, you could try out the Ad Rotator widget. What it does is that it shows the possible ad codes you might have and they are shown randomly. Well, in case you have an Adsense account, you don’t really need to use the randomization feature of this plugin. The thing is that at least you could easily post the snippet of code on to your blog sidebar and voila! You have your ad on the sidebar. […]

Windows
said on October 6th, 2006 at 17:01 · Permalink

отличный ротатор!

John Baker
said on October 17th, 2006 at 10:29 · Permalink

This is a great tool. Thank you. Is it possible to turn off the randomization part of this widget, so that it displays blocks of text serially rather than randomly?

Will
said on October 26th, 2006 at 19:25 · Permalink

Great plugin! I’d love to know if it could be modified to use in the body of the post.

Pete
said on December 3rd, 2006 at 19:22 · Permalink

Fantastic widget! Works like a charm. Thank you very much! Bravo!!

Bogdan
said on December 25th, 2006 at 01:19 · Permalink

Thanks for the simple, yet really useful widget. Keep up the good work.

juls
said on December 28th, 2006 at 07:08 · Permalink

i’m using your widget/ plugin thank it works well. But i seem to be showing every ad at the same time? Even when i use the more tag? I thought it should rotate the ads? Am i doing it wrong?

Podchef
said on January 12th, 2007 at 11:12 · Permalink

Really like the concept behind this widget. Is there any reason why the amazon ads aren’t showing up in the box? All my other widgets work fine, but for some reason the amazon links for individual books won’t show in this widget or a regular php widget. Any chance there could be a conflict with my theme (anaconda) or another widget? Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

imnotbored.net » New Improved About Me
said on January 22nd, 2007 at 06:29 · Permalink

[…] I started with the AdRotator widget. This little darling will rotate up to 9 chunks of code, which is perfect for what I wanted. Then the hacking, cursing, and pacing about asking the cat for advice started. […]

rob
said on January 24th, 2007 at 23:52 · Permalink

Hi, I have created my first widget, the Oddball Widget…
What does the Oddball Widget do?

The Oddball Widget will provide webmasters with easy to install, fresh daily content for FREE!

The Oddball Widget allows the webmaster to choose how many funny ebay auctions they wish to display in their sidebar. Oddball Auctions will update these auctions every day, so webmasters will have fresh, interesting content every time a viewer returns. Unlike most widgets and RSS feeds, this widget will not “steal” your viewers. If a viewer clicks on an interesting auction, a new window or tab will open, so you don’t lose your viewers! The auctions listed will not have any adult items, so this widget is suitable for any web site.

Additionally, if a webmaster has an ebay affiliate account, the widget allows them to enter their PID, and receive credit for 50% of the clicks from their site. Once someone clicks on an interesting auction, ebay places a 7-day cookie on their computer. So, if the viewer buys ANYTHING on ebay in the next 7 days, ebay pays a commission. For example, if one of your viewers clicks on “image of donald duck in a pancake”, then leaves ebay, then, the next day they buy a car from ebay, ebay pays a commission on the car!

So not only do you get free, daily content, but it can make money for you as well! If a webmaster just wants to display the free daily content without getting an ebay PID, that’s fine too. Want to sign up for a PID? Get one quickly here

This widget is fully stylable using CSS, so it will fit in perfectly with the look of your site.

The widget zip file consists of only 2 files, a brief readme.txt with installation instructions, and the widget itself. The widget should be installed in your /wp-content/plugins/widgets folder.

I was wondering if you’d like to add this widget to your site.

JR
said on May 21st, 2007 at 17:50 · Permalink

Hi, I added a simple bit of coding to make the super ad rotator take php (and java if it didn’t take that already it does now)

In the function widget_adrotator just before the place this code (note I am showing the existing ‘div’ bit below to make clear where to place the extra line)

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<?php $chunks[$chunkno] = eval_html($chunks[$chunkno]);?>
<div class="adrotatorwidget"><?php echo $chunks[$chunkno] ?></div>

Now, at the very end of the php file copy paste this coding:

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function eval_buffer($string) {
    ob_start();
    eval("$string[2];");
    $ret = ob_get_contents();
    ob_end_clean();
    return $ret;
}

function eval_html($string) {
    return preg_replace_callback("/(<\?php|<\?)(.*?)\?>/si",
"eval_buffer",$string);
}

And now it takes php as well..

If you like a similar function but just for anywhere in the body, I just finished programming a piece of code… it is slightly limited in that you can only use it in one location for now..

Leave a message here if you like to test it.

Dmytro Shteflyuk
said on May 21st, 2007 at 18:14 · Permalink

Hello, thanks for suggestion.

If you don’t mind, I could integrate your code with the plugin and add some options (to render or not the div, to execute or not PHP code).

Of course, I would add “thanks” to the changelog along with the link to your site.

Steven Halford
said on June 6th, 2007 at 16:45 · Permalink

Hi,

I have set up two adrotator widgets, one with linksynergy ads and one with amazon ads, however they are both displaying the linksynergy ads.

http://yellowmonkey.mintdesigns.co.uk

If you view source you can see it references adrotator-1 and adrotator-2.

If I swap the code around I just get the amazon ads.

At one point it was even displaying google ads (i am using adsense manager).

Please help.

stash
said on June 17th, 2007 at 15:17 · Permalink

I have a similar problem to the above user. I have used this widget on several blogs in the past and they all worked great, but now i have one new blog that i just built and it got set up with wordpress 2.2 and if i put in more than on instance of the rotator they will all show the same rotator.

is there something in w-p 2.2 that i can change to fix this?

for now im just going with one instance of this program running at a time

thanks if there are any options to fix this error

I LOVE THIS WIDGET and would love it on all my future blogs

thanks

Cory Kemp
said on June 19th, 2007 at 04:41 · Permalink

First of all, great plugin. I’m finding it very useful. However, I am running into the same problem that Steven seems to be having. I can only run one ad rotator at a time, because the second rotator simply reflects the same ads as the 1st rotator even with different chunks of html in them.

What would you suggest I look at?

JR
said on July 2nd, 2007 at 16:48 · Permalink

Hi all,
since I can’t remember what exactly I changed, but you can download the working version from my site.

http://www.jrbeltman.com/downloads/

Dmytro Shteflyuk I dont know m8 if you got my email a while ago with the updated code, but please post a later version here when ever it is ready. I dont like putting a link up on my site, but feel sorry for those having issues using your great plugin!

Goe D
said on July 4th, 2007 at 07:26 · Permalink

Great plugin. Works well. Is there a way to run it in multiple rotator?

JR
said on July 13th, 2007 at 19:18 · Permalink

Goe D
on the WP screen where you manage your widgets you can specify how many adrotators you like to use. Set that number and apply and new ad rotator widgets will show..

Download the adjusted version on my site as mentioned above for this to work on the latest WP versions

Alex
said on July 15th, 2007 at 03:34 · Permalink

Hey Jr ! I’ve been trying to get your version off your site, but I keep getting this same error when trying to download the file:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: add_action() in /home/jrbeltma/public_html/downloads/ad_rotator_plugin.php on line 23
Is it just me or is the server down ?

JR
said on August 25th, 2007 at 14:28 · Permalink

Hi there Alex,
I didn’t check if the latest version has been posted here, so if you do try taking the plugin from my site remember 2 things:

1. Right click and save target (or link) as….
and dont left click as it will try and execute the script :)
2. – http://www.jrbeltman.com/downloads/ad_rotator_plugin.php
is a plugin that can be placed anywhere on your site, but isn’t the widget as Dmytro programmed. It is very similar in what it does though. But again isn’t a widget for your sidebar
– http://www.jrbeltman.com/downloads/adrotator.php is the working version of Dmytro’s sidebar widget!

Ramil
said on September 9th, 2007 at 10:26 · Permalink

Does it support rotation of Javascript?

Neil
said on September 14th, 2007 at 04:06 · Permalink

Hi..

Juist like to say I LOVE this versatile widget. THANK YOU!

I use it on my site to rotate album covers, giving a fresh look to the graphics on every visit. Superb!

Just one question…

Why the maximum of 9 rotators? Any way I can change something to make it higher (30?)? Or is there a WordPress limitation?

Henry
said on October 8th, 2007 at 05:53 · Permalink

I have a modified version of adrotator allowing you to use ads with multi-line codes without having to convert them to single-line codes. Read about it here

Dearnepal
said on April 6th, 2009 at 07:10 · Permalink

how to delete this plugins. please help me. now i can’t use this plugins. i will add after some time.

i added this plugins. but its not showing in plugins list. how can i deactivate or unistal.

Please, help

Dear Nepal

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