I'm reviewing OpenAds and so far one thing I can't figure out is whether it is a PHP-based webserver, or if its a set of scripts which are called from a webserver like Apache.
The docs says it is an application server, and PHP and MySQL are the only dependencies listed. I'm not sure if I'll be happy with that. I think it does require a web server like Apache or Lighttpd.
Exploring further, I just noticed a folder in etc called xmlcache which contains a bunch of binaries. What are binaries doing in an open source project? No explanation either that I can find. Would be nice if they had a readme file in there.
Hmmm, from the looks of lib/OA/DB/XmlCache.php, those files are simply compressed XML file caches, created by Cache_Lite? I can't really tell for sure. I'm trying to manually remove the cache header and decompress the content to no avail. That's annoying - can't find and docs on them either.
I found an old version of Max Media Manager and it doesn't have the xmlcache folder. ??
I also downloaded OASIS from Sourceforge and I'm reviewing that now.
I'm doing a little work on a custom adserver and I'm coming up with some ideas, like the criteria which we can use to match an ad to an "ad zone" - size obviously, the site domain, season (like halloween), etc. Do you think color matters?
In thinking this through, I happened upon Friends don't let friends see adverts over in Ireland. Good stuff. I'm not going to use the plugin quite yet, but I really like the concept.