The new Joomla 1.5 now comes with a brilliant banner management component.

I have copied some of the meaty stuff about the Joomla banner management below. I will revise this article when I have fully explored its capability.

The first thing you will notice are the Joomla related adds in the right hand column. These have matching keyword tags in them so the ads will only appear if an article is opened that have the matching keyword tags. This functionality is in line with how Google ads works by recognising keywords and only displaying relevant ads, really cool eh for a free system!

For now just now, believe me when I say that the functionality and different configurations you do with the new banner component is outstanding! Well done the joomla developers!

Column Headers

Click on the column heading to sort the list by that column's value.

• #. An indexing number automatically assigned by Joomla! for ease of reference.

• Checkbox. Check this box to select one or more items. To select all items, check the box in the column heading. After one or more boxes are checked, click a toolbar button to take an action on the selected item or items. Many toolbar actions, such as Publish and Unpublish, can work with multiple items. Others, such as Edit, only work on one item at a time. If multiple items are checked and you press Edit, the first item will be opened for editing.

• Name. The name of the Banner. You can click on the name to open the Banner for editing.

• Client. The Client for this Banner. Clients are entered using the Banner Client Manager.

• Category. The Category this item belongs to. Clicking on the Category title opens the Category for editing. See Category Manager - Edit . Note that Banner Categories are separate from other Categories, such as those for Articles, Contacts, Newsfeeds, and Web Links.

• Published. Whether the item has been published or not. You can change the Published state by clicking on the icon in this column.

• Order. The order to display items. You can change the order by entering the sequential order and clicking the 'Save Order' icon in the column heading.

• Sticky. Whether or not the Banner is 'sticky'. If one or more Banners in a Category are sticky, they will take priority over Banners that are not sticky. For example, if two Banners in a Category are sticky and a third Banner is not sticky, the third Banner will not display if the module setting is 'Sticky, Randomize'. Only the two sticky Banners will display.

• Impressions. The Impression count is the number of times the Banner has been displayed on a page. The first number in this column is the actual number of Impressions so far, and the second number is how many Impressions were purchased by the client.

• Clicks. The first number is the total number of clicks that have been made on the Banner since the counter was reset. The second number is what percentage of the time user clicked on the banner when it was displayed.

• Tags. Optional Tags to be used for displaying specific Banners based on the content of the Article being viewed. If the Banner module Parameter 'Search By Tag' is set to 'Yes', Banners whose Tags match the Keywords entered for each Article will display when that Article is being viewed.

• ID. The ID number. This is a unique identification number for this item assigned automatically by Joomla!. It is used to identify the item internally, for example in internal links. You can not change this number.

• Display #. The number of items to display on one page. If there are more items than this number, you can use the page navigation buttons (Start, Prev, Next, End, and page numbers) to navigate between pages. Note that if you have a large number of items, it may be helpful to use the Filter options, located above the column headings, to limit which items display.

In the meantime you can look at the Joomla Documentation here.