OpenX Ad Server version 2.8.4 announced

On Friday, January 22, as one of the last things before the start of the weekend, OpenX.org announced the upcoming release of version 2.8.4 of the OpenX Ad Server. According to the blog post, the free service OpenX Community Hosted has already been upgraded, and the new version will be available for download ‘later in the week’ (which is a bit odd, because at the time of posting the week was effectively over).

More focus on OpenX Market

The announcement on the blog focuses primarily on the many changes and new features for using the OpenX Market. That’s not surprising, because OpenX Market is the main source of revenue for the company. Making it easier for more OpenX publishers to participate in this market was a move that was to be expected.

Bug fixes and improvements

The blog post doesn’t mention it, but this new release also fixes dozens of bugs and long standing issues. The Issue Tracker on the OpenX Developer site lists a total of 144 issues. A little bit surprising, perhaps, is that only 115 of these have been labeled as ‘fixed’.

Version 2.8.4 includes the security fix that was rushed out just before Christmas with the emergency release of version 2.8.3, and it also contains the fix for the serious under delivery problem for contract campaigns. Both of these fixes were contributed by independent consultant and developer Matteo Beccati.

Reviews to follow

Since the downloadable version of OpenX Ad Server v2.8.4 is not yet available, I haven’t been able to test drive it yet. I do have the OpenX Community Hosted account, and I can see the new features for working with OpenX Market in there.

I’m planning on writing some follow up blog posts as soon as possible, for instances about the new upgrade procedure (which is said to have a mandatory registration step), the new OpenX Market features and other noteworthy issues.

Your feedback, please!

What would you like to know about this new release? What should I be researching and writing about? Drop a comment below or contact me with your views!

You can submit my OpenX support request form if you’d like to discuss working with me on your OpenX project.

This problem was so serious for me and my clients that I was forced to take action. People had reported the issue in various places, but as far as I could tell no action had been taken at OpenX.org. I decided to hire Matteo Beccati, a former OpenX Senior Developer who is now working as an independent OpenX consultant. With his background and experience, he was able to quickly analyze the issue, and develop and test a fix for this bug.

The problem originates from a small but crucial mistake in the hourly maintenance process. At the top of every hour, the OpenX software recalculates the number of campaign impressions it needs to deliver for the next hour. The program code retrieves and uses the delivery statistics for the current hour, which (by definition) are not yet available. As Matteo described it in is bug report:

Impression allocation for contract campaigns seems to be constant for every hour, regardless of the traffic patterns. That’s a problem for most of the sites that have a bell shaped delivery and can’t reach the hourly target during the night. Those “lost” impressions will only be reallocated on the long run leading to overall under delivery.

Having found the cause of the problem, Matteo was able to develop a fix for it. We have been testing the adjusted code for a while now and I’m happy to be able to report that affected campaigns have started to perform as expected.

We decided to publicly release the fix so the OpenX community can benefit from it. The bug report and patch are available now in the OpenX issue tracker. Please note that this fix has been developed and tested on OpenX version 2.8.2 only. Applying patches to software should be done by qualified programmers only. As usual, make backups of any file you are about to change.

The issue has been labeled ‘critical’ by the OpenX development team. Hopefully this means the fix will be included in the upcoming version 2.8.3 of OpenX Ad Server.

I want to thank my client PSH Media Sales in The Netherlands for enabling us to use their campaign delivery statistics for analysis and for allowing us to test the fix on their installation. And I want to thank Matteo Beccati for devoting some of his precious time to this job. We would appreciate your feedback on this patch.

Update January 23, 2010: this fix is included in the upcoming release of OpenX Ad Server version 2.8.4, making it available to thousands of users that aren’t comfortable with applying patches to their software.

OpenX Ad Server v2.8.2 released

Just before the weekend, version 2.8.2 of the OpenX Ad Server was released. This new release had been announced a few days earlier.

What’s new?

The major changes in this version are in fact invisible to the naked eye. The OpenX.org team have said that they’ve fixed problems in the previous release that sometimes resulted in over or under delivery of contract campaigns. Another fix is for campaigns with companion positioning enabled, preventing the display of blank zones in some specific situations. The new type of invocation code for Facebook apps that was recently added to OpenX Hosted is unfortunately not part of this new v2.8.2. download release. Most likely this is a separate plugin that is not provided to download users.

Should you upgrade?

I just completed an upgrade procedure for my own OpenX 2.8 reference installation, and all went perfectly fine. This new release also contains upgrades to a few of the plugins that come with the standard download package. And the extra plugin that I have in my system as a test was upgraded without any problems.

If you run version 2.8.0 or 2.8.1 on your own site or server, an upgrade is a must, if only because of that security problem that was fixed. I do recommend doing a proper test upgrade on a copy. And of course: make backups!

OpenX Ad Server version 2.8.2 can now be downloaded from the OpenX website.

Update October 20

The availability of OpenX Ad Server v2.8.2 has now been announced on the OpenX weblog. The announcement also has a link to the release notes. If you want to know all the details, there is a complete overview of all 113 changes on the OpenX developer site.

OpenX Ad Server v2.8.2 announced

On October 12, OpenX have announced the imminent release of version 2.8.2 of the OpenX Ad Server. It will be available for users of OpenX Hosted initially, as of Tuesday October 13. The download package will be released a few days later. The news was announced on the OpenX blog, which also contains more detailed information about the new enhancements, improvement and fixes.

This is the first major update to the OpenX Ad Server software since late May 2009, and the improvements in this release focus on improving accurate delivery of contract campaigns, avoiding serving blank zones when using companion positioning and fixing a number of security issues.

OpenX Hosted update schedule

According to messages published by OpenX Hosted staff on Twitter, the upgrade of OpenX Hosted is scheduled for Tuesday, October 13, starting at 2 PM Pacific time. Ad delivery is supposed to be unaffected, but access to the admin panels may be intermittent. The work is planned to be completed by 6 PM Pacific time the same day. For users in Europe and elsewhere: the upgrade will start on Tuesday October 13 at 22:00 UTC and should be finished by 2:00 UTC on Wednesday October 14.

The OpenX Market plugin in OpenX Hosted will be upgraded during the night, starting on October 14 at 12 AM (midnight) Pacific time, ending rougly 2 hours later. It should not affect ad delivery but it may cause intermittent access issues for the user interface.

OpenX download release date

The exact release date for the download package of OpenX Ad Server version 2.8.2 has not been announced yet. As soon as this new version is available, I will contact all my clients on the upgrade service mailing list and plan the upgrade of their ad servers to this latest version.

Update October 14:

It seems that the upgrade of OpenX Hosted has been completed. Right now, it reports back as ‘OpenX v2.8.2-rc25′.

Update October 19:

OpenX Ad Server version 2.8.2 has been released for download a few days ago.

OpenX Ad Server v2.8.1 released

Just before the weekend, version 2.8.1 of the OpenX Ad Server was released. This new release is mostly about bug fixes, a fix for a pretty serious security problem, and a few nice improvements.

Improvements

The functional changes in version 2.8.1 of OpenX Ad Server focus on the integration with OpenX Market:

• There is a new screen in the ‘Inventory’ tab, called ‘OpenX Market Quickstart‘. It allows traffickers to set multiple campaigns to use OpenX Market in one pass, while at the same time setting a floor price for all of them or even a separate floor price for each individual campaigns. This new feature will be welcomed by users managing many campaigns, because it makes it so much easier to start using OpenX Market.
• Also new is an ‘Ad Quality Tool‘. This screen provides an overview of ads that were served through OpenX Market onto any of the websites, even allowing the user to stop some ads from showing up again (for instance to prevent competitor ads from being displayed on a site).
• It is now possible to link more than one OpenX Ad Server installation to OpenX Market. This is particularly useful for publishers that have more than one OpenX installation, or perhaps an OpenX Hosted account in addition to a self-hosted OpenX Ad Server.

It is no surprise that the new features and improvements all have to do with OpenX Market. That is, after all, the major force in the OpenX business model, and making it easy for publishers to start using OpenX Market or use it more often is a smart move.

Bug fixes

Version 2.8.0 was the first release of the 2.8 branch. It was bound to have some bugs in it, even after pretty long and intense beta testing. So a bug fix release was needed, and that is what version 2.8.1 is also about. The release notes have all the details. A big problem in version 2.8.0 that has now been fixed would allow any user to log in as an administrator.

Upgrading from an earlier version

The release of version 2.8.1 was my cue to try upgrading an existing v2.8.0 system to this newer version. There is a set of upgrade instructions on the OpenX website.

I was particularly interested to find out how the plugins would be upgraded, since that is something new to version 2.8 and I had no experience upgrading them. It turns out the developers have built a pretty neat trick for that. During the upgrade procedure, you get to specify the folder path of the previous installation, and the upgrade wizard will look at all the plug ins it finds there. It will then check for any upgrades available on the OpenX website and finally it initializes each plug-in in the upgraded installation. All of this is completely automated and it worked like a charm. Well done!

Should you upgrade?

I think if you run OpenX 2.8.0 on your own site or server, an upgrade is a must, if only because of that security problem that was fixed. This new version 2.8.1 was also the first that presented not a single problem when upgrading an older v2.6.5 system. I still recommend doing a proper test upgrade on a copy, but this new version 2.8.1 looks like it’s ready for the world!

I do have one bit of criticism: I’m personally not a huge fan of releasing an upgrade just before the weekend. As with any upgrade, there will always be people that run into problems upgrading, and they will have a harder time finding support during the weekend than in the middle of the week.

When OpenX Hosted was announced last year, many people feared this would result in less attention for the downloadable edition. It turns out that it is actually the other way around. OpenX Hosted is currently still running on version 2.7.30-beta. So hosting OpenX on your own server has the benefit of being able to run a newer version than using OpenX Hosted.

OpenX Ad Server version 2.8.1 can now be downloaded from the OpenX website.

I’m going to start experimenting with upgrading larger OpenX installation to this new release. If anything interesting comes up, you can be sure I will write about on this blog.

OpenX version 2.6.5 released

It got a little bit snowed under by the unveiling last week of the new OpenX Ad Server version 2.8, but a new version of the 2.6 branch has also been released. This brings the most recent release there to version 2.6.5.

OpenX v2.6.5 contains fixes for 30 bugs and security issues and one new feature.  Some highlights: AdSense click tracking was fixed after the change in Google’s URL for delivery those ads, some fixes for people running OpenX on PostgreSQL, and the API now supports adding or changing delivery limitations to banners. All details can be found here (warning: very technical!).

As always, when a security release is available, it is wise to upgrade existing systems as quickly as possible. Upgrading from any earlier version of OpenX 2.6 to this v2.6.5 is rather simple, since it doesn’t involve any database changes.

You can download OpenX version 2.6.5 from the releases archive.