[Nick Budden]

Hi everyone,

I’ve got a bit of a weird request…I’m consider putting together Buddypress as an ad server due to the weirdness of my ad serving needs. Basically, what I need is for affiliates to be able to log into a buddypress install behind a walled-garden, inside of which be able to download an embed code for my ads (the ads being iframes due to project requirements). It will be easy enough to create the ads for copying inside a single post, but because this is an affiliate program I’ll need to restrict which posts can be viewed by which users in order to keep them embedding ads from those those programs they have been approved for (I suppose according to category).

Also, I need my advertisers themselves to be able to log into buddypress and view the metrics on their ad impressions (I suppose the google analytics API could do the trick for this). My questions, if anybody would be kind enough to help me out, are:

1) Can I restrict which categories my buddypress users can see, in order to restrict which ads users can see?

2) Also, our advertisers would really need to see a completely different site than our affiliate members, albeit with similar information from the database. Would there be a way to separate the content our advertisers see? Our would this call for a new buddypress install?

Thanks for any help!

[modemlooper]

Seems you want something more like http://www.openx.org/

[Nick Budden]

Hi modemlooper,

Thanks for the response. I’ve been looking at openx, and considering it, but I’m not sure it’s quite what we need. We’re actually a rich media publisher, looking to pay affiliates based on impressions when they embed our rich media into a post on their blog. Because this is paid on impressions rather than click-through, it’s really an ad serving platform rather than a conventional affiliate program, which rules out affiliate programs.

Where I believe openx may or may not be ruled out is that it may just be much more than we need. We need to set up one piece of code for each piece of rich media, and we need our affiliates to come to the site and get this code each time we release a new piece of media. I’m not an excerpt (I haven’t yet downloaded openx to play with it), but I get the impression that openx is designed more for someone to embed a single piece of code into their site, and receive ads. Also our advertisers will need metrics, but there won’t be any ad serving per say on the part of our advertisers, so there may be too much there for our advertisers as well.

In short, the “ad serving” would really just be meant to measure impressions on affiliate blogs who’ve embedded our rich media, which is why I thought it might be better to go for a simpler solution in buddypress, but like I said I’m not an expert on openx so feel free to let me know if I’m barking up the wrong tree.