This is the official Discourse advertising plugin. It allows advertisements to be served by supported advertising platforms for users with a Discourse forum.
### Step 1 - Install the Official Discourse Advertising Plugin
As seen in a [how-to on meta.discourse.org](https://meta.discourse.org/t/advanced-troubleshooting-with-docker/15927#Example:%20Install%20a%20plugin), simply **add the plugin's repository url to your container's app.yml file**:
* Navigate to the Admin section in your Discourse forum.
* Click on Settings and a left vertical navigation bar should appear.
* Choose your advertisement platform by clicking on "Adsense Plugin" if using Adsense as your advertisement platform and/or click "DFP Plugin" if using the DoubleClick for Publishers advertisement platform.
1. Add in your publisher ID - your publisher ID can be obtained from your ad provider and can also be found in your ad tag (see picture below).
2. Choose your trust level from the dropdown box. This will only display ads to users with a certain level of trust. For more details about trust levels go to the **Plugin Features** heading.
3. Get the Advertisement Tag from your Ad Provider - see the images below to see what a tag looks like.
4. Add parts of your ad code to Discourse's site settings as per the color coding in the images below. Only use the image for your ad platform.
5. Choose Your Ad Size - this is the same size that you've put into your ad provider to create your ad. Go to the **Plugin Features** heading to see a list of supported Ad sizes.
Input 3 parts - ad code (topmost box), width, height. And be sure to untick the disable box. Then, refresh the page for the inputs to take effect, and go to the ad location.
`dfp_nth_post_code` and ensure your total number of posts in topic >=N. For example, if you input N = 4, the forum should have at least 4 replies/posts)
Once you've configured your settings and your advertising platform has ads that are ready to serve, navigate to the page where you've inputted for the location and you should see ads. For example, a Discourse forum serving ads looks like this:
1. Non-Docker Installation - If you have experience with programming. This will set up this plugin as a git submodule in your Discourse directory.
2. Local Development - If you want develop locally and have experience with programming. This will set up this plugin as a symlinked file in Discourse's plugin directory.
* Clone the [Discourse Adplugin Repo](http://github.com/team-melbourne-rgsoc2015/discourse-adplugin) in a new local folder.
* Separately clone [Discourse Forum](https://github.com/discourse/discourse) in another local folder.
* In your terminal, go into Discourse folder navigate into the plugins folder. Example ```cd ~/code/discourse/plugins```
* Create a symlink in this folder by typing the following into your terminal
:
```
ln -s ~/whereever_your_cloned_ad_plugin_path_is .
For example: ln -s ~/discourse-plugin-test .
```
* You can now make changes in your locally held Discourse Adplugin folder and see the effect of your changes when your run ```rails s``` in your locally held Discourse Forum files.
Issues and Pull Requests are greatly appreciated. Bear in mind that when submitting feature requests, if it's not something that most people will use, it probably won't get merged.
