[HowTo] [3.5] Insert Ads in the forum homepage (Professional Guide)

[roosevelt]

Hello everyone,
I've seen many webmaster just put advertisements on their forums. It looks really unprofessional and doesn't go well with the forum style. See the demo below of what you'll be creating in vbulletin:

Demo URL: http://www.relforums.com/ (notice the Sponsors table, and the yahoo ads)

Ok enough with the chit chat lets get back to business.

Follow the steps below:

-> Login to your admincp (www.yourforum.com/admincp/)
-> Go to: Styles & Templates -> Style Manager
-> Choose Edit Templates from the drop-down menu of the skin you wish to modify.
-> When all the templates are loaded double click Forum Home Templates
-> Double click FORUMHOME

Now for this demonstration I decided to put the advertisement between the menu buttons and where the forum bit start. Similar place where the guest message thing is, so I looked for:

<!-- / guest welcome message -->               </if>

And just after that I’ve inserted the following ad codes:

<!-- Sponsor Ads -->
  <table class="tborder" cellpadding="$stylevar[cellpadding]" cellspacing="$stylevar[cellspacing]" border="0" width="728" align="center">
  <tr>
  <td class="tcat" colspan="6"><phrase 1="$vboptions[bbtitle]">Sponsors</phrase></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
  <td class="alt1" colspan="6">
  <div align="center">
  My Sponsors code
  </div>
  </td>
  </tr>
  </table>
  <br /><br />
  <!-- Sponsor Ads Ends -->

That’s all I did. If you are familiar with HTML, editing the table codes would be extremely easy for you to do. Now if you wish to display the ads only to the guests, put this conditional statement code <if condition="$show['guest']"> before <!-- Sponsor Ads --> and </if> after <!-- Sponsor Ads Ends -->.

The differences are now the ads are more noticible, goes along nicely with your design and doesn’t look if you just threw it on your template.

Good Luck!!