Atomic Droplet

A quick overview...

The process of configuring your forum to run with Atomic Droplet is done in four stages:

  • Log in or create an account, fill the webmaster signup form and wait for confirmation that your account has been set up.
  • Either install one of the pre-packaged templates or follow these instructions to integrate Atomic Droplet on a test server (if you have one) or directly on your live site.
  • Atomic Droplet will run a test campaign on your site while you get everything set up how you'd like.
  • Once everything's working bring your site live with a single click.

Easy. Let's go.

How Atomic Droplet really works.


Atomic Droplet is a javascript based advertising infrastructure much the same as (say) AdWords, with a couple of differences because we: (a) Serve images, (b) Charge by impression, not click and therefore, (c) Have to report back which adverts actually got served. Bearing this in mind, the approximate workflow for serving a page with Atomic Droplet adverts on it is as follows

  1. The client requests a page from your forum as usual.
  2. The <body> section of the page has a property saying that once the page is loaded it needs to request and run a script from Atomic Droplet. The location of this script (and the tag that describes it) is unique to your site, and is the only part that has to be unique to your site.
  3. This tag gets triggered when the page loads and goes off...
  4. ...to fetch the function from Atomic Droplet.
  5. Atomic Droplet makes a bundle of potential adverts...
  6. ...and returns them to the page. It then tries to fill in some HTML divs (the sections in yellow) with the ads and finally...
  7. ...returns a call back to Atomic Droplet reporting which sections successfully had ads served.

Simple. For you, anyway. In essence there are only three things you need to do: put your own personal script tag in the <head> section; change the body tag to trigger the script when the page loads; and set up some appropriately sized sections in the forum templates for the adverts to be served into.

If you're using either the vBulletin or PhpBB2 pre-packaged templates then all you need to do is install these first, set the script tag, then test to ensure your site has come up OK before bringing it live.

Setting the script and body tags.


Once you've received confirmation that your account has been promoted to a webmaster account, log in and you will see all the sites you run (just the first one in this case) listed at the top of your "My Account" page. Click on the name of the site and you will be presented with a section titled 'Ad-server integration' with that site's script tag in a grey box.

Copy this tag and paste it in the template that defines the header for all pages (i.e. 'header' in vBulletin and overall_header.tpl in PhpBB2) just before the </head> tag. While there, set a parameter onload="droplet()" in the <body> tag.

Creating the advertising locations.


To keep things simple, Atomic Droplet serves only three kinds of adverts, and each type of advert is it's own location. There's no "Leaderboard on homepage" and "Leaderboard on forumtopics" as distinct entities, there's just Text Adverts (wherever they are), Leaderboards (wherever they are, if you run them) and Medium Rectangles (wherever they are and, again, depending on whether or not you run them). This is not to say, however, that you have to run Medium Rectangles, or that if you do, you need to run them on the whole site. All we ask is that you provide a reasonable description of where they are ("top of all pages" or "on editorial pages only") so advertisers know what they are getting.

Feel free to 'view source' on either test forum (vBulletin or PhpBB2) or for inspiration on how to modify your HTML.

Text Adverts

Text adverts are the bare essential requirement for running Atomic Droplet on your site. These consist of a 'wide & thin' banner (here shown highlighted in yellow) running across the tops of the main tables in your forum. These are "Forum Home Templates, FORUMHOME", "Forum Display Templates, FORUMDISPLAY" and "Show Thread Templates, SHOWTHREAD" in vBulletin; and index_body.tpl, viewforum_body.tpl and viewtopic_body.tpl in PhpBB2.

The reference implementation has these implemented as two <tr>'s containing a <th> and <tr> respectively, and with the colspan parameter set to imply full width. The top <th> contains the introductory "Advertise on this site..." line and has to have a parameter id="ad_intro". The <tr> contains the text advert itself and has to have a parameter id="ad_txt".

Leaderboard Banners

It is desirable to carry leaderboards (a 728x90 pixel banner) since they are what has become of the 'traditional' banner and are what an advertiser is most likely to expect. In most cases the leaderboard is best run at the head of every page (via 'header' in vBulletin or overall_header.tpl in PhpBB2). In either case, the container for the advert needs to have a parameter id="ad_ldr" set and be able to contain a 728x90 pixel image.

Medium Rectangles

Medium Rectangles are becoming of increasing importance, but are in many ways incompatible with the layout of many forums. Their inclusion in Atomic Droplet is therefore something of an experiment and is aimed more towards those that have editorial content on their sites. A container for a medium rectangle needs id="ad_mrt" setting and needs to be able to contain a 300x250 pixel image.

Testing and bringing live

Once you have set your templates correctly, Atomic Droplet will serve test advertisements into each of the targets that you signed up for. Verify that this is working for the main pages on your site - the index, forum index and thread pages. If necessary, move these changes over to your production site.

Finally, and only if testing completed successfully, you can bring your site live within Atomic Droplet. Log in as yourself and select the site you have just modified from your "My Account" page - exactly the same as when you went to get your <script> tag. You'll see a paragraph warning you that the site is not currently live and offering a link to bring it up. Once clicked, this will cancel the test campaign; make your site visible for advertisers; and inform anyone who has expressed an interest in advertising on new sites that you have come live.

And that, in a nutshell, is it. Feel free to contact me for help or additional clarification - davep@atomicdroplet.com.