In a recent post to the SitePoint PHP blog Hugo Giraudel shows you how to create an ad manager as a Symfony-based application. His ad manager allows you to use videos, images or HTML content to create and cache advertisements to add to any application.

The main idea was to build an ad manager. What the hell is an ad manager you say? Let’s say you have some places on your site/application to display ads. We do have things like this on our site, and one of our teams is (partially) dedicated to bringing those places to life with content. Now for some boring reasons I won’t list here, we couldn’t use an existing tool, so we were doomed to build something from scratch. As usual, we wanted to do a lot without much coding, while keeping an overall simplicity for the end user (who is not a developer). I think we came up with a fairly decent solution for our little project.

He uses ESI rendering with Twig templates to identify the ad to return, grab its configuration and render it back to the requesting client. He includes a global configuration (URI and allowed types) an an example of a per-ad configuration file that includes the cace settings, data type and link. The code is also included to consume the request for the ad and render the result. There's also a "randomize" method that picks a random item from the array by weight. Finally, he includes the view templates that can be used to render the results - one for the main ad layout and a few for each type (video, image or HTML).