Today marks an important day in the history of OpenX, and perhaps looking back on it in a few years, even the internet advertising industry. The OpenX team today launched version 2.6 of their flagship product. It’s been a long development process. I’ve actually been running early beta versions of this new release since November 2007. I’ve seen the new system grow and mature and each new beta brought interesting new features.

There are many exciting new features in OpenX version 2.6, too many to mention them all in a single blog post. But I have to mention the new Single Page Call feature that will help webmasters everywhere keep their pages loading fast even with many ads on them. I’m also very excited about the API that’s part of this release. I believe this is going to be very good for third party developers who want to create additional functionality without having to modify the OpenX core. And a very important new set of features is about managing users and permissions.

Please join me in congratulating everyone at OpenX with this new release.

Update: I’ve put together a ‘recipe’ for upgrading your OpenX to this newest version.

The OpenX team have released an upgrade of the OpenX 2.5 beta software, this time version 2.5.70-beta. In addition to some bug fixes, the most important change has to do with internationalization. OpenX are committed to making the software available in many languages, and this upgrade includes support for 11 languages including French, German, Italian, Japanese and simplified Chinese. I think it’s very smart to think about the whole world as a market and not just the English speaking users.

I upgraded a few of the OpenX instances I operated yesterday without any problems. According to the issue tracker this new beta has fixes for 29 bugs (many of them have to do with translations, obviously).

It seems this 2.5 beta is getting closer and closer to stability and the OpenX team have said repeatedly that they’ll release it as 2.6 as soon as it’s stable. I’m looking forward to that.

A personal note: I do not recommend using beta software on production websites, unless you know exactly what you’re doing, or are prepared to deal with the inherent risks of using beta grade software on a live website.

The OpenX team have released the latest upgrade to the popular OpenX 2.4 software. It carries version number 2.4.7. According to the OpenX blog post earlier today, this version resolves no less than 23 bugs. More information and a download link are available here.

The OpenX team have released a new version of the OpenX 2.5-beta software. Version 2.5.69-beta contains fixes for 70 bugs and also corrects a security vulnerability. I’ve been involved in the beta testing program since November 2007 and have been running 2.5 beta for a few of my sites. The features that are being added with each release are impressive and very promising. Once OpenX 2.5-beta is found to be stable, it will be released under version number 2.6. You can download your own copy of this beta here, or you can find out more first by reading the accompanying blog post on the OpenX blog. A personal note: I do not recommend using beta software on production websites, unless you know exactly what you’re doing!