Advertising banners are a common way for sites to raise money by referring their visitors to sponsor sites. Also, some sites wish to participate in a link exchange. The Discus software supports the addition of advertising banners by allowing the administrator to modify a template file controlling the look and feel of all pages. Discussed here are the applications of banners, from the simple to the complex.

Banner addition (and other general interface customizations) in Discus 4.0 and higher are handled by editing the skin for the board. General tips on customizing skins in version 4.0 and higher are found in the customization documentation.

To add a banner to the top of all pages in the user interface, modify the skin for your board and add the appropriate code in the dynamic_top part of the skin.

To add a banner to the bottom of all pages in the user interface, modify the skin for your board and add the appropriate code in the dynamic_bottom part of the skin.

Customization of the skin for your board will add your banners (or other content) to each screen of the user interface, including message pages, the board topics page, and documentation.

Adding banners to pages

Banner addition (and other general interface customizations) in Discus 3.10 and lower are handled by editing the newpage.conf file (or the skin that has been selected for the board).

Adding banners to the Discus documentation pages

The Discus documentation pages are simply static HTML files that reside on your server. To add banners to those pages, open those pages in your HTML editor and insert the necessary code as desired. This procedure is safe for all of the Discus *.html files except make sure that you do not manually modify any of the files under the "messages" subdirectory.

How to use Server Side Includes (SSIs)

Simply place the code for the desired Server Side Include (SSI) in your skin file or the newpage.conf file as described in the sections above.

Note: CGI scripts do not parse their own output for SSIs, so on dynamically generated pages (profile editor, preview, search results, etc.) the SSI output will not be inserted. DiscusWare discourages the use of SSIs for this reason.