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Plugin: AdsManager (by Heigho)

Description

This plugin enabled you to include AdsManager Items in a Newsletter. It has been developed by Heigho and available as a paid plugin on their website.

This plugin enables you to search in all your Adsmanager items and insert them (one by one or by a selection on one or several categories) in your Newsletter.

You can also use this plugin to automatically include your newly created (or modified) Adsmanager items in an Auto-newsletter or a Newsletter.

It works with both Adsmanager versions, 2.6 and the old one, and you can install in Joomla 1.5 or 1.6 without any problems.

Moreover it allows to translate your ads with JoomFish (for Joomla 1.5) and it loads your Adsmanager CSS style, in this way it maintains your graphical choices and offers a strong coherency between your web-site and your newsletter. It supports five modes to display ads:

  • Only Title

  • Short mode (Box)

  • Simple view

  • List/table View

  • Details view

Plugin

Single Item

Each item can be selected one by one.

  • Display:

    • Title Only: only the title will be inserted

    • Short: the Ads title, Image, (eventually) price and date will be inserted into a Box.

    • Simple: it offers the simplest view of your ad. It inserts the title, the description and the first photo. It is not affected by complicated css styles in order to be compatible with all email clients.

    • Category View: the elements will be inserted using the Adsmanager list view of your site.

    • Details View: the element will be inserted using the Adsmanager details view.

  • Display pictures: You can decide to display or not this picture in your Newsletter or display a resized size of it.

  • Title: make your title visible. If you group by category, it shows category title, otherwise it displays ad title.

  • Clickable Title: make your title clickable (so linked to your online version) or not.

  • Columns: allow you to input the columns number for Short/Box mode.

  • Group by Category: sort and group your ads according to the category they belong to.

  • Language: if you use Joomfish whit this option you can translate ads in the language selected.

Categories

You can select one or several Ads categories and AcyMailing will automatically include the Ads belonging to the selected categories.

  • Maximum Number of Articles: The inserted tag will be replaced by a maximum of X items.

  • Minimum Number of Articles: This option will only be displayed if you access this plugin for a Smart-Newsletter. AcyMailing will only generates your Smart-Newsletter if the minimum number of items found is reached.

  • Order by: You can order by ID, Title, Expiration Date, Price ( only with default number format: with dot decimal and without commas between every group of thousands!!).

  • Filter: This option will only be displayed if you access this plugin for a Smart-Newsletter. You can set a rule so that only newly created or modified Ads are added to your Newsletter.

Parameters

  • Display articles: This parameter enables you to filter the list of Adsmanager items in the tag system

    • All articles: AcyMailing will display all your ads

    • Only published articles: AcyMailing will only display your published ads

      • ​

  • Remove javascript: This option enables you to remove any javascript code included in your Adsmanager item as the javascript won't work in most of mail clients.

  • Show date : enables you to remove date of creation. In “Short” mode: date is displayed at the bottom of the box; “Intro”: in a separate column.

  • Show price : enables you to remove/show price of your ads. If you are using Adsmanager to display announces without price field select “No”.

  • Show contact : enables you to hide contact info in Full view mode.

Language

This plugin is integrated with JoomFish for load into the newsletter your translated Adsmanager ads.

  • Adsmanager 2.5.x : it loads your translation, but it cannot find few adsmanager constants. Don’t worry the solution is very simple:

  1. Go to Adsmanager fields

  2. Select default fields (examples: ad_headline, ad_price, ad_kindof) and translate the title into your default Joomla site language. E.g. : ADSMANAGER_FORM_KINDOF -> trasled into “type”;

  3. Please, remember to translate also values fields in “ad_kindof”, e.g.: ADSMANAGER_KINDOF2 -> “Carry”

  4. If you have a multi-language website and you are using JoomFish, you should translate also the default fields.

  • Adsmanager 2.6.x

  1. Be sure to have installed both the Joomla admin and the site language translation packs.

  2. Control if you have activated them.

  3. Install or ri-nominate your Adsmanager file language properly. Please control if your language code in Adsmanager translation is equal to the correspondent language in Joomla!

  4. If your problems persist you can try with solution explained some lines before for old version of Adsmanager.

Style

Remember that email isn't the web: CSS and HTML support is far lower for email than it is for the web. Many email clients don't support complex Css Style, so your newletter can be little different from the Preview. Support for even simple CSS varies considerably between clients, and even different versions of the same client. Your beautiful design work might look great in one email client, but chances are when you look at the same work a different email client the results will not be the same. To partially obviate this problem, we applied inline CSS.

We import your Css style in order to realize a layout equivalent to your website and we guarantee the correct functionality of this plugin, but we can't assure you that the newsletter will look like for every email client. This is no an our fault, but a lack of email clients, so you should follow the rules for a good newsletter! Look for some guidelines in internet. Don't worry, the global structure will be maintained intact, only some proprieties like round boxes won't be accepted by every email clients. Moreover we supply with this inconvenient offering you the simple mode view mode and the box mode view.

Customize your item using some CSS

You can change the styles used for the title and the content area by editing

  1. your CSS Adsmanager file (it MUST be placed in “…components/com_adsmanager/css”)

  2. AcyMailing template.

When you change your Adsmanager css file you will modify how your ads will be displayed both in your site and your newsletter! In fact we import your css, so in this way you can maintain your graphical choices. Unfortunately there are some restriction on css due to email clients standards.

Edit the AcyMailing template used for your Newsletter and then set some styles:

  • Style for the content area will be used to encompass your Adsmnager item

  • Style for the content title will be applied to your content title

  • Style for the read more link will be applied to your read more link (if you have one)

  • You can also set the style of all your links using the Link a field

  • If you want change Short mode style you can modify the code around line 1100 or you should add some new styles with the correct name in your template (or in stylesheet field). We have used these tags: table.tabBox2 .content1; table.tabBox2 td.uno; table.tabBox2 th; table.tabBox2 div.imgad; table.tabBox2 img.ad ; table.tabBox2 img.icon; table.tabBox2 div.ad; table.tabBox2 div.price; table.tabBox2 div.date

Create your own template

You can also modify the way your Ad is displayed by creating your own template which will be used to render the Adsmanger item. Please follow those instructions, we don't recommend you to modify the adsmanager plugin directly otherwise your changes will be overwritten when you update AcyMailing.

Create a file in the folder media/com_acymailing/plugins (if the folder does not exists, please create it first). The name of the file should be adsmailing.php If this file is available on your server, AcyMailing will use it and won't use the default one. On this file you can access the element $extravalues[0] (which is the ad object loaded from the content table) and the element $tag (which contains the information of the current tag used in your Newsletter).

Recommendations

a) A web server running PHP 5 is required to run this utility. Your PHP installation must support the DOM extension.

b) You should not use advanced css styles proprieties, such as round borders, because many email clients cannot support them. If you would create successful email newsletters that will look good, even in the worst email clients, look for some guidelines in internet.

c) The price have to be expressed in the default English format without commas and with dot used to mark the radix point.

d) If you have installed Adsmanager and you haven’t modified any files, this plugin should works perfectly. It works correctly also if you have customized only Adsmanager css files. Instead, if you have applied some relevant changes be sure that:

  1. The default english language exists

  2. Your Acymailing have Emogrifier file (it has been integrated since version 1.5)

  3. Your Adsmanager Ads images are stored in “...images/com_adsmanager/ads/”

  4. For Adsmanager version < 2.5 : in …/components/com_adsmanager/adsmanager.html.php and precisely into the function show_html_ad() in the

    , the “default” case must be exactly the follow row:

  5. In Adsmanager version >=2.6 in the file components/com_adsmanager/views/details/tmpl/default.php you cannot change lines around row 177 :

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