We have a lot of Publishers who use forum software and in particular the very popular PHPBB forum, which is free.

Software like PHPBB is designed in a way so as to extrapolate functional code from the design, known as “templating”. This allows forum owners to easily modify the look and feel of their forum and even use pre-built themes that they can plug in and have running almost instantly.

Occasionally we get an e-mail from a Publisher who is having issues plugging in our ad code; usually reporting an error something like:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '}' in /yoursite/includes/template.php(127) : eval()'d code on line 182

This is happening due to the “templating” system that PHPBB uses, which doesn’t like the use of the curly brackets in the TPL (template) file.

This issue is easily solved! Let’s take the following ad code as an example:

<!-- START ADTOLL.COM CODE V1.0 -->
<STYLE>
A.at_adv_here_3987453, A.at_pow_by_3987453 {font-family: Tahoma,Arial; font-size: 10px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-variant: normal; text-transform: none; color: #5A8C35; text-decoration: none; }
A.at_adv_here_3987453:hover, A.at_pow_by_3987453:hover { color: #FA880B; text-decoration: underline; }
</STYLE>
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript">
adtoll_see_your_ad_here = 1;
adtoll_your_text = "Advertise here";
adtoll_show_powered_by = 1;
</SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT src="http://adserve.adtoll.com/js/at_ag_3987453.js" type="text/javascript"></SCRIPT>
<!-- END ADTOLL.COM CODE V1.0 -->

Any webmaster with experience in HTML will clearly see the top part of the code contains styles (between the <STYLE> tags) and the bottom part of the code contains the javascript needed to produce the ads.

To get our ads working in PHPPBB all that needs to be done is the styles moved to the CSS file and the javascript into the TPL file. This is demonstrated below.

This code is to be put into the themes CSS file:

A.at_adv_here_3987453, A.at_pow_by_3987453 {font-family: Tahoma,Arial; font-size: 10px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-variant: normal; text-transform: none; color: #5A8C35; text-decoration: none; }
A.at_adv_here_3987453:hover, A.at_pow_by_3987453:hover { color: #FA880B; text-decoration: underline; }


This code is to be put into the TPL file:

<SCRIPT type="text/javascript">
adtoll_see_your_ad_here = 1;
adtoll_your_text = "Advertise here";
adtoll_show_powered_by = 1;
</SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT src="http://adserve.adtoll.com/js/at_ag_3987453.js" type="text/javascript"></SCRIPT>

It’s actually that easy and it will work every time! This solution not only works for PHPBB but almost any free software designed with a “templating” system.

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