====== Unleashing OpenAds ======

According to the [[http://www.openads.org|OpenAds Website]], "Openads provides you with a family of easy-to-use products backed by expertise from the world’s largest ad space community".  That's a pretty good start on describing it.  With OpenAds, you can run your own ads, allow others to run ads, or take advantage of an array of existing ad networks, like Google AdSense, Commission Junction, Trade Doubler, and others, or a combination of all three.  While it's possible to run any of these types of ads without OpenAds, OpenAds provides the flexibility to pick and choose when and where you run what types of ads quickly and easily.  So, if you find that Google AdSense pays best for some of your sites, and Text Link Ads produce better on others, you don't have to make application or HTML level changes to make those decisions.  OpenAds also provides central location for managing and monitoring ad campaigns across any number of sites or pages, by the advertisers and publishers themselves.  OpenAds effectively provides the building blocks for your own ad network!

Of course, we'll start with moderately less ambitious goals.  Jamie and I (your friendly Virtualmin developers) recently launched a wiki to provide web access to the full contents of our books about Webmin, as well as to provide a mechanism for the community to get involved in the process of documenting Webmin and Usermin.  We called it Doxfer.com and launched both a Webmin and Usermin wiki.  You can see it here: [[http://doxfer.com]].  Just a few weeks after launching, it already gets over 1000 visitors a day, so we've got a pretty good place to put some ads!  Of course, it probably won't bring in much money and might end up advertising for Virtualmin competitors if we chose to just run AdSense ads.  So we'd like to run ads for Virtualmin over on Doxfer.  OpenAds gives us a really easy way to set that up, and if in the future, other projects start using Doxfer for their documentation we can easily delegate management of their own ads via OpenAds.  Doxfer might just end up being a tidy little business at this rate.

====== Logging Into Virtualmin ======

We'll begin by logging in with our virtual server account, "doxfer".  This is an account created for management of the "doxfer.com" domain.  This account has been granted Install Scripts privileges in the Server Template used to create the virtual server.

{{:doxfer-login.png|:doxfer-login.png}}

====== Install OpenAds ======

In the left menu, click **Install Scripts**, which will take us to a page full of installable applications.  If any applications are already installed, the //Installed Applications// tab will be selected, and you'll need to click //Available Applications//.  OpenAds is in the **Commerce** category.

Click the radio button beside //OpenAds//, and scroll to the bottom of the page and click the **Show Install Options** button.

{{:openads-install.png|:openads-install.png}}

The defaults are usually fine, but it's possible to choose a different database (if others exist, or if the user has the privileges needed to create new databases), or choose another path for the application within $HOME/public_html.  We'll stick with the defaults for now.

{{:openads-install-complete.png|:openads-install-complete.png}}

Virtualmin downloads the package, unpacks it into the correct location, and sets up the correct database tables.  Now we can login and get to work!


====== Logging Into OpenAds ======

At the end of the installation Virtualmin offers a link to OpenAds.  Clicking it takes you to the OpenAds login page.  Here, you can login with the same username and password you use for logging into Virtualmin as the virtual server owner (username is "doxfer" in my case).  This is the default username and password for most applications that Virtualmin can install, though some require a specific name for the "admin" user.

{{:openads-login.png|:openads-login.png}}

OpenAds may ask to upgrade the database after installation.  If so, just click the Upgrade button to continue.  It will then remind you to setup an hourly run of the maintenance script, which Virtualmin has already setup for you.  So you can click **Proceed** on this page.

====== Add An Advertiser ======

To get started with OpenAds, you'll want to first create one or more advertisers.  This is the first page you'll see:

{{:openads-advertisers.png|:openads-advertisers.png}}

Click the //Add new advertiser// link, and fill in the form.

{{:openads-advertisers-form.png|:openads-advertisers-form.png}}

Click **Next** to proceed to the campaign creation form.

====== Create A Campaign ======

Once an advertiser is created you'll be prompted to create an ad campaign.  The options on this form are self-explanatory, so I won't go into too much detail, but I will point out that I can set up this campaign to run just for leftover ad space.  So, if I had a paying campaign with higher priority, my unpaid Virtualmin ads wouldn't be shown.  OpenAds is pretty flexible in allowing you to pick your higher paying ads over lower paid or freebie ads.

{{:openads-campaign.png|:openads-campaign.png}}

I've left everything on this form at its defaults, sense I want this to be a low-priority campaign that runs all the time without scheduled start or end dates.