Banners

A banner is a template from which users will generate links. Administrators create banners using the admin interface located at https://affiliates.mozilla.org/admin/.

There are three types of banners:

  • Image banners, which show an image link when embedded.
  • Text banners, which show a text link when embedded.
  • Update banners, which show an image link when embedded. The image shown changes if the user has an up-to-date version of Firefox installed or not.

Accessing the Banner Admin

The steps below describe how to access the admin interface for banners:

  1. Open https://affiliates.mozilla.org/admin/ in your browser.
  2. If a popup saying “Authentication Required” and “Mozilla Corporation - LDAP Required” appears, enter in your Mozilla LDAP credentials and click OK.
  3. You will be shown a login form asking for a username and password. These Affiliates-specific credentials should have been provided to you by an existing admin or developer. Enter the username and password you were given and click “Log in”.
  4. Once logged in, you will see the Admin dashboard. There are several boxes with lists of admin panels you can access; the banner admin panels are in the box titled “Banners”.

Adding Image Banners to Affiliates

If you want to add a brand new banner to Affiliates, you’ll need to gather the following:

  • A name for the banner, and names for any new categories or subcategories that need to be created. Since these need to be localized, they need to be chosen early and submitted for localization by a developer.
  • The URL for the Banner to redirect to.
  • The actual images to use for the banner. At least one of these must be 125x125 pixels, otherwise an empty preview will be shown for the banner on the site.

Once you’ve gathered all these and had the necessary strings translated, you can upload the banners to the site via the admin interface:

  1. Access the Banner Admin using the directions above.
  2. Enter the Image Banner Admin by clicking the “Image banners” link. Then click the button to “Add image banner”.
  3. Enter the name of the banner, and select the category it belongs under. Note that you must select a subcategory. The select box shows two levels of categories, with subcategories being indented underneath their parent category.
  4. Enter the URL you wish users to be sent to when they click the banner under the “Destination” field.
  5. Make sure the “Visible” checkbox is checked. If it is unchecked, the banner will not show up in the generator on the site.
  6. Under the “Image banner variations” section, click the “Add another Image Banner Variation” link to add fields for a variation. Select the color and locale of the image you’re adding, and use the file field to select the image file for that variation.
  7. Once you have added all the variations for the banner, click the save button to submit your changes and save the banner to the database.

Once you’ve saved the banner, you should log in to the website to check if the new banner is available, localized, and that you can create links using it correctly.

Updating Existing Image Banners

Sometimes, we need to update the image being used in an Image Banner. It is vital to note: any new images must be the same size as the image they are replacing [1].

It is highly recommended that, prior to replacing the images, you create some banners using the images you intend to replace, and copy the embed codes for them to a test page, like jsfiddle. That way, once you’re done, you can go back and check to see if the replacement worked.

Once you have the new images, you can update the old images via the image banner admin:

  1. Access the Banner Admin using the directions above.
  2. Enter the Image Banner Admin by clicking the “Image banners” link. Locate the banner with the images you need to replace and click it’s name to open the banner editing page.
  3. Search through the list of “Image banner variations” at the bottom of the page to find the variations that need to be replaced. You can Ctrl-Click or Cmd-Click the image filenames shown in the “Image” column to open the images in a new tab and ensure they’re the right ones to replace.
  4. Use the file input in the “Image” column to select the replacement image for each variation that needs to be replaced.
  5. Once all the replacements have been selected, click the save button to save your changes.

After saving, you should check the website to see that the images have been updated, as well as checking the old banners you created beforehand to ensure they’ve been replaced as well.

[1]This is because the filenames used for banner images are generated from, among other things, the image size. If the image size changes, the filename will change, and people who were using the old image will continue to use it instead of getting the updated image.