The OpenX team have released the latest upgrade to the popular OpenX 2.4 software. It carries version number 2.4.8. According to the OpenX blog post earlier today, the main reason for this upgrade is a security fix, but they’ve also fixed 13 bugs and added some enhancements. More information and a download link are available here.

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.

This tip is about upgrading your OpenX 2.4 installation, with emphasis on making the upgrade easy, risk-free and quick. By upgrading I mean going from version 2.4.x to 2.4.y or from 2.6.x to 2.6.y (I call this a minor upgrade). But it applies to upgrading from version 2.4 to 2.6 as well. The most important tip I can give is: make backups!
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Many people have noticed that version 2.4 of OpenX handles banner and campaign weight differently from version 2.0. Let’s work with a simple but real life example: There are two advertisers. Each advertiser has one campaign, but the second advertiser happens to have provided two banners that need to be rotated.

In version 2.0 each campaign would have received 50% and then the two banners of the second campaign would each split that 50% to get 25% of the probability.

But in OpenX 2.4 things are a little different. The picture below illustrates this: the campaign with two banners grabs 66,66% of the total probability, and the campaign with one banner gets the remaining 33,33%.

There is a way to get around this, and it requires only a little change in the way campaigns are defined. It all has to do with campaign weight. To continue with the example above, the campaign that has 2 banners must be given a lower weight to reflect there are more banners in it. Most people use the default weight that OpenX assigns to a campaign, but you can change that manually.

Here’s the recipe: give each campaign a weight of 100 to start with, but then adjust the campaign weight when you add more banners to it. If it’s a campaign with two banners, change the campaign weight to 50, or if the campaign has 4 banners, change the campaign weight to 25. Then when you go back to the probability screen the two campaigns are linked to, you’ll notice that the probabilities there have also changed, as can be seen in this image.

(This tip applies to OpenX 2.4.x and was initially written on June 25, 2008)