Hi there. I've been using Simpleads for a few years now in several projects; since manual ad sorting in blocks where you need to display multiple ads is a requeriment in most of the cases, I've tested several options in order to achieve this. I started using Nodequeue (which Simpleads provides integration with out of the box), but I've found out that the Node Order module is perfectly able to handle ad sorting with less "cognitive load".

It's somewhat better suited than Nodequeue because you won't need to perform an additional step every time that you create an ad. With Nodequeue you must to create the ad, then manually add it to the queue. I've noticed that site admins find this confusing, since they also must select an ad zone when creating the ad and they don't quite understand why it's necessary to do it again, plus you have to introduce a new concept (the "queue") to them, which has no direct relation (in the UI) with the task at hand.

With Node Order, site admins basically create the ad and it will show up in the block right away (above the rest, most of the times), then they can opt to change its position if they want to. And this can be simplified even further adding a contextual menu in the block with a link pointing to the ad zone's order page.

It also helps with something else: with Nodequeue there's no strict relationship between the ads assigned to a queue and the ads assigned to a zone, which means that you can assign any ad to any queue you want. With Node Order, a block only can contain ads actually assigned to the zone, which helps to prevent erroneous or unwanted ad assignments and make things simpler to grasp.

The code to handle the integration this is quite simple, I can provide a patch for the 1.x branch if you're interested.

Best regards.

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Proteo created an issue. See original summary.

minnur’s picture

Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)