Fireside Media Development Blog

What is Openx

OpenX is, in my opinion, the most efficient and hands-free open source ad server on the web today. It’s flexible, easy to use, and best of all, free.

What is WordPress

WordPress is one of the leading platforms in blogging on the web today. Whether you are self-hosted (using wordpress.org) or being hosted on Automattic servers (using wordpress.com), WordPress is an amazing blogging platform which makes blogging easy and fun.

This OpenX and WordPress tutorial will outline how to more effectively use the targeting features of OpenX utilizing the built-in features of WordPress. It will explain how to do this by using WordPress tags and OpenX source parameters, both built-in features to WordPress and OpenX, respectively.

OpenX Solution Used: Hosted OpenX (http://hosted.openx.org/)
WordPress Version: 2.6.2

For this tutorial, I will be using tags are the “source” for OpenX.

Step 1: Setup tags so OpenX can view them as a “source.”

<?php
        while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
                $fsm_oxtags = get_the_tags();
                if ($fsm_oxtags) { foreach ($fsm_oxtags as $tag) {
                        $taglist .= $tag->name . '|';
                }
                $taglist = rtrim($taglist, '|');
                $oxtags = rawurlencode($taglist);
                }
        endwhile;
?>

I have these in the top of my single.php file within WordPress. This only creates the variable of $oxtags so it can be echo’d elsewhere.

Details of Step 1: The first bit of code will create the loop. then it will go through each tag and set it as “tag |” because I am using pipes to separate each tag for OpenX. Next, it will trim off the last pipe because it’s not needed, creating something like… “tag 1|tag 2|tag 3|tag 4″ … and like I just mentioned, it will strip off the last pipe. Lastly, it will put that string, “tag 1|tag 2|tag 3|tag 4″ … into a raw encoded URL string which we will be able to echo later in the page. Note: this is only being set at $oxtags so it can be used elsewhere, nothing is echo’d in this part of the script.

First of all, a huge, HUGE, thank you to all of our speakers and sponsors for making this event possible. It was a huge success and would not have been possible without everyone involved.

Photos

Thank you to everyone involved with WordCamp NY! It was a great time and I feel it was very successful.

Here is a quick recap of the speakers.

• Matt Mullenweg - The State of the Word
• Aaron Brazell - Making it into the Big Leagues
• Shay David - How to Use Kaltura
• Jeremy Clarke - How to Run a Blog Network
• Jen Simmons - Video on WordPress
• Jeremy Zilar - How the New York Times uses WordPress

A huge thanks to our videographer, Valerie Gurka. She recorded each speaker and the videos will be ready in about a week.

Second, a huge thanks to Leora Israel for being the official photographer for the event. A ton of great photos that will already be ready soon. I’ll make another post when the photos are ready.

And of course, our sponsors. Thank you so much for making this event possible. Sun Microsystems, Atlantic Metro Communications, Margaret Roach, and Kaltura.

Flickr Details

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/wordcamp
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/wordcampny
• http://www.flickr.com/groups/wordcampny/

This weekend is WordCamp NY 2008. I have been organizing this event for the past 3 or 4 months now and I’m really excited for it.

We have a great list of speakers lined up and it’s going to be an awesome event.

Matt Mullenweg will be keynoting the event. I have never met Matt, so it will be a first to meet him and hear him speak about The State of WordPress.

Thanks to everyone involved with the event!

We have the start of what will be a long line of open source products by Fireside Media, LLC. To start it, we are releasing an updated version of the Twitter Updater plugin.

The plugin was originally written by Victoria, but she gave us permission to release the updated version here. The plugin was modified by Jonathan to include tinyurl.com’s API as part of the Twitter updating.

We have some other great ideas for Wordpress plugins already coming along and will be releasing them in stages. Expect some new plugins to come out within the next few weeks.