Revive Adserver is an open source project, dedicated to building and supporting the open source ad server software and the community of users around the world.

Revive Adserver logoThe Revive Adserver team is immensely proud to announce the immediate availability of the Release Candidate of Revive Adserver v4.1.

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the unveiling of the Revive Adserver project, with the release of version 3.0. We feel that this is the perfect day to announce the next major release of the Revive Adserver software, which has been given version number v4.1. Since this new version includes a large number of changes and enhancements, including some breaking changes, we think it is appropriate to first make available a Release Candidate. This will enable users, administrators, plugin developers, hosting providers and consultants to put the new version to the test in all sorts of scenarios and environments. If everything goes according to plan, we expect to release the final v4.1 in 2 weeks from today.

Below is a partial list of enhancements and improvements included in this Release Candidate for Revive Adserver v4.1:

  • We added a new (optional) setting to prevent a user from being redirected to the landing page associated with a banner, when the banner has been deactivated or when the campaign it belongs to is no longer active. In such cases, impressions and clicks on those banners will no longer be counted either.
  • When generating invocation codes (tags), there is a much shorter comment than in earlier releases (long comments can be switched on while generating tags if so desired).
  • In the user interface, a number of terms have been renamed, to bring the language used into line with modern terminology used in the advertising industry:
    * ACLs are now Delivery Options;
    * Delivery Limitations are now Delivery Rules;
    * Targeting Channels are now Delivery Rule Sets.
  • We added some new Site Delivery Rules, to enable white-listing or black-listing based on hostnames and/or registerable domain names. The development of this feature has been sponsored by a generous donor who has asked to remain anonymous.
  • We added a new security feature to invalidate all the active sessions of the current user when changing or recovering their password.
  • We added the option to use TinyMCE as a WYSIWYG HTML editor (just like in WordPress) when creating and editing HTML banners. The editor is switched off by default, for
    increased backwards compatibility, but it can be enabled by default via the user interface account preferences. This preference is ignored when editing HTML ads containing scripts or iframes in order to avoid inadvertently altering 3rd party tags. The development of this feature has been sponsored by a generous donor who has asked to remain anonymous.
  • We added a new {img_url_prefix} magic macro that will print the configured http/https images URL during delivery, depending on the calling protocol.
  • We added (beta) support for HTML5 banners, allowing the upload of banners in IAB compliant ZIP file formats. The development of this feature has been sponsored in part by Aqua Platform, a company specializing in Revive Adserver hosting at enterprise scale.
  • We added support for ordering advertisers, campaigns, banners, websites and zones by the date each was last updated, on the main index page for each, to make finding recently updated entities easier in large installations.
  • We added automatic switching to the mysqli driver when mysql is selected as the database type in the configuration file, but the mysql extension is not available (and vice versa).
  • There have also been many other smaller enhancements and improvements, described in detail in the release notes.
  • We have fixed numerous bugs, and there are also some non-backward compatible changes, so please make sure you carefully study the release notes.

Important: this release candidate and the actual v4.1 release later, will have a Non-Backwards Compatible Change. Support for PHP 5.5 has been dropped and Revive Adserver now requires at least PHP 5.6.0.

Full release notes for v4.1.0-rc1 can be found on our Github page.

Download, install and upgrade

Revive Adserver v4.1 Release Candidate is available for download now.

Please keep in mind that this is a release candidate, and as such it can result in issues. If you don’t feel confident about testing beta-level software, we recommend that you wait until the final v4.1 is available. This will be announced here on the blog.

Once downloaded, please refer to the instructions for Installations of Revive Adserver or for Upgrading Revive Adserver. Make sure that the server(s) being used meet(s) the minimum technical requirements.

Community contributions

Several new developments in version 4.1 have been sponsored by community members, either financially or in the form of code contributions. We’re very grateful for the support we’ve received. If you would like to contribute to our project, please consider becoming a patron on Patreon.com.