Based on “Displaying ads from TextLinkAds in a rails application”, here’s the first release of my typo sidebar plugin to display ads from TextLinkAds. The plugin uses typo built-in caching as I explained before.

Download

Download either textlinkadssidebar.zip or textlinkadssidebar.tgz.

Installation

Unzip (unzip textlinkadssidebar.zip) or untar (tar xzvf textlinkadssidebar.tgz) directly into the components/sidebars/ directory of your typo installation.

Configuration

Using the sidebar tab of the admin section of typo, you’ll find an Item named “Text-Link-Ads” on the left hand side.
Simply drag it to the right side where at the desired location (the higher the better!).
Enter a title for that section (here I use nanoRAILS Sponsors).
Fill in your XML KEY from the “Get ad code” section on TextLinkAds.
Enter your affiliate ID (so you can get paid for referrals).
Enter the text for the referral link (I have “Advertise on nanoRails”).
Click on the Publish Changes button.
Once you refresh your blog, you will have a TextLinkAds section.

6/15/06 update: to use in the trunk of typo (1055 currently), you will need textlinkadssidebar-1055.zip or textlinkadssidebar-1055.tgz.

The short of it is that sidebar plugins have changed quite a bit! You may be better off recreating from scratch using one of the available ones.

The longer story is that you no longer need a configure.rhtml. Instead, you use the setting helper to describe each setting. You need to subclass Sidebars::ComponentPlugin instead of Sidebars::Plugin. You also need to remove the configure method and the way you specify the display name and and the description is also done with a helper.

Oh yeah, the file content.rhtml is unchanged :D