[ic] tags with [banner]

[Jim Balcom]

I am posting this for the generations to come who go pawing through the
archives to figure out how to deal with banners.

Jaime has written a very good tutorial in this message. I do hope that the
'keeper of the docs' will include all of this in the next version.

The one thing that I would like to add - which is probably obvious to most
people - except me! Is that in Jaime's example he is using:

sp=category_results

Here you can also use results or results_big. I suspect that his are better
but I haven't seen them.

The more important thing, that I kept missing is that he is calling an
image, which I kept kind of downplaying. This is actually the key to your
banner. You need to use some graphics program to build a jpeg (or something)
that tells them that if they click on this image that wonderful things will
happen. But, it appears to me that the image has to also contain the text
that incites them to click on it.

With what Jaime has written, the customer will get a list of all of the
products that you have in a certain category when they click on this image.
It's really cool!

With John Beima's help I got a popup program working that contains the
banner tag. When a page loads, they get a popup with a banner to other
areas. Now I can have those annoying popups like the big boys! :-)


On Fri, 29 Nov 2002, Jaime Viehweg wrote:

JV>>Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 21:08:18 -0600
JV>>From: Jaime Viehweg <interch@viehweg.net>
JV>>Reply-To: interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
JV>>To: interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
JV>>Subject: Re: [ic] tags with [banner]
JV>>
JV>>On Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 08:48:49PM -0500, Jim Balcom wrote:
JV>>> JV>>Sorry to follow up on myself...
JV>>> JV>>
JV>>> JV>>It seems that you don't actually need the [pragma safe_data] bit
JV>>> JV>>at all.  You only need the interpolate and </a>.
JV>>> JV>>
JV>>>
JV>>> What do you have in banners.txt?
JV>>>
JV>>> How are you calling it from the main page?
JV>>>
JV>>> -= Jim =-
JV>>
JV>>Here is pretty much everything you should need to make it go.  Note
JV>>that even though it might look like you should call the database or
JV>>the tag "banners" (with an s), you really need to use "banner" (no s)
JV>>for everything.
JV>>
JV>>This seems to work as desired for me.  I'm running RedHat 7.2 and
JV>>Interchange 4.8.6-1.
JV>>
JV>>banner.txt:
JV>>===========
JV>>
JV>>code    category        weight  rotate  banner
JV>>books   one     1       0       [page search="fi=products/sf=category/se=books/sp=category_results/ml=30"]<img src="banners/books.gif" border="0" alt="Books"></a>
JV>>housewares      one     1       0       [page search="fi=products/sf=category/se=housewares/sp=category_results/ml=30"]<img src="banners/housewares.gif" border="0" alt="Housewares"></a>
JV>>jewelry one     1       0       [page search="fi=products/sf=category/se=jewelry/sp=category_results/ml=30"]<img src="banners/jewelry.gif" border="0" alt="Jewelry"></a>
JV>>movies  one     1       0       [page search="fi=products/sf=category/se=movies/sp=category_results/ml=30"]<img src="banners/movies.gif" border="0" alt="Movies"></a>
JV>>
JV>>exerpt from index.html:
JV>>=======================
JV>>
JV>>        [banner weighted=1 interpolate=1]
JV>>
JV>>exerpt from catalog.cfg:
JV>>========================
JV>># #banners
JV>>Database        banner  banner.txt      TAB
JV>>Database        banner  NUMERIC weight
JV>>
JV>>jaime
JV>>--
JV>>interch            | I read recently that human beings use only 15%
JV>>@    Jaime Viehweg | of their brains capacity.  Makes you wonder
JV>>viehweg.net        | what they do with the other 75%.
JV>>_______________________________________________
JV>>interchange-users mailing list
JV>>interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
JV>>http://www.icdevgroup.org/mailman/listinfo/interchange-users
JV>>


-= Jim =-

                   .-.
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                  // \\
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