Some Tiki Express Tutorial fans asked what an LTS version is. LTS stands for Long Term Support. It gives you the assurance of using a well-tested version that will be maintained for 5 years.

For example, Tiki 18, released in January 2018, will be supported until January 2023.
This is important for environments that prioritize stability over cutting-edge but less stable versions. If you want to know more and better understand the Tiki release cycle, please check: https://tiki.org/Versions.

Let’s start our Tiki Express Tutorial on the Banners feature in Tiki Wiki

How to enable the feature from the Control Panels

There are several ways to place a banner in Tiki Wiki, depending on what you need and the level of control required. In some cases, a plain HTML or JavaScript snippet from an advertising company inside one or more pages is good enough. Sometimes you’d like to control a single element displayed under certain conditions in a Tiki module across several wiki pages. And in other cases, you really want to control or monitor the number of clicks, the lifetime, the dates, and other parameters that determine when a banner is displayed.

The Tiki Banners feature is highly configurable and designed for demanding scenarios. Note that it can also be repurposed for things that aren’t traditional banners, like timed messages to your community, user event announcements, or click tracking on an element, etc.

I’m sure some of you will have terrific ideas—please share them in the comments—but for now, let’s roll.

First things first: we need to enable the Banners feature in the Control Panels. The Banners feature is an advanced feature, so I switch the preferences filter from Basic to Advanced and save that as my default preference. If that’s unclear, check the tutorial about Administration Tips in Tiki Wiki.
That’s a good habit to start with and helps you configure your Tiki.

In the Features panel, I scroll down to Administrative Features and activate Banners. Not a big deal, but if you don’t feel comfortable with activating a Tiki feature, I also made a tutorial for that. Go to my channel or my website and grab what you need.

Let’s also activate the Banner plugin so it will be one of the options to place a banner on a page. I go to the Editing and Plugins panel, search for “banner” using my browser’s find tool, enable the Banner plugin, and click Apply to save the change.

Now that the configuration is in place, I’d like to use a real working website instead of the default out-of-the-box install. I prepared one for this video using Bootstrap 4 and already created a new menu and a couple of pages. Let me update the header, move the admin menu down, and put the user menu in place. Then I’ll switch the theme and adjust the layout.

I’m doing that without detailed explanation as it’s pretty basic. If you want a tutorial covering these steps, just add a comment on the video on my YouTube channel, and I’ll do a “logo/menu/layout basics” Tiki Express Tutorial.

Now we have our nice-looking website running and our feature activated. Let’s go to the Settings menu. You can see a new menu item, Banners, which leads to an empty list. Let’s populate it by creating our first Tiki banner.
I click the Create banner button.

And wow—look at that! So many parameters and controls to give you extra flexibility, unlike many other web apps. With Tiki you can really control everything for your banner.
I’ll explain in a minute, but right now let’s place our first banner.

Set a banner using the Banner plugin on a page

As this website is about house renting, let’s pretend I have a friend starting a painting business and I want to help. He sent me a JPG banner and I don’t need to monitor or control anything—just display it as long as I don’t remove it.

In the URL field, I put the link for the banner… Let’s use my own website for the demo.
I won’t change anything about limitations for now.
However, I have to create a banner zone.

A zone is a marker to tell Tiki which banner goes where. You need at least one. You usually use zones to group banners by size, orientation, or language. You’re not limited—you can use these areas however you want.
I create my zone A and assign this banner to it.
Again, I don’t change anything about duration, time, or days.
I choose the Use image method, browse for my image, and save the banner.
Back to the list—there it is.

Now I need to set the function that will display the banners within my zone A on the page.
Remember that a minute ago we activated the Banner plugin. It’s available from your toolbar when editing a page, but you can also use the Smarty function directly. You’ll have less control over the banner, but it will do the job perfectly for this case. I’ll copy the plugin code.

I go back to Home, where I have space to display a banner.
I edit the page, paste the Smarty function for the banner, and set the zone to A (as my banner was assigned to that zone).
Save—and I have my friend’s banner displayed!

Let’s click on it, go back, and refresh.

View the banner stats

Back on the Banners page, in the list I can already see important information. In the action menu on the right (under the wrench), there’s a Stats item where I can find more details regarding usage and the options I set for the banner.
If I assigned the banner to a specific user (client), they will also have access to that information.

Now that we know how to set a basic banner in Tiki, let’s go back to Create a banner so we can review the important parameters.

Review the banner parameters

URL — the link the banner points to.
Client — the user assigned to this banner. Besides letting you manage your customers using a tracker or request payment via PayPal through Tiki, this grants the user access to the stats for all their assigned banners. That’s pretty important if you want to monetize or do any kind of business or trade using Tiki’s banner feature.
Maximum impressions — the total number of times the banner can be displayed before it stops.
Maximum impressions per user — limits how many times a single user will see the banner.
Maximum clicks — the number of clicks allowed before the banner stops displaying.
Zone — where you assign your banner (we already covered this).
Time controls — display a banner only between specific dates, only during certain hours, or on certain days.

And finally, the banner methods:

  • HTML — gives you the most freedom; you can use almost anything here.
  • Image — as we just tested, the easy one.
  • Flash — legacy; likely to be removed at some point.
  • Text — very useful for internal messages to your community users or company intranet users.


That’s really much more than the usual third-party banner plugins you find in other CMS and wiki applications.

Set a banner using modules

I won’t give a complete explanation of modules here. Very quickly: Tiki layouts are divided into areas (top, topbar, toppage, left, right, bottompage, bottom). Using a module, you can decide in which section, perspective, structure, page or group of pages, and for which language it will be displayed—or not displayed. It’s very powerful!

Very, very quickly: I grab some code from an advertising company.
I go to Tiki → Settings → Modules.
There, I go to Custom modules and create a new module. I give it a name and paste the code I copied previously.
Now I need to add this module in Tiki.
I select the mybanner module I just created and set some basic options—position and parameters like nobox=y&section=wiki page&language=en.

I exit Modules.
Back on my home page, I have my banner in place, and it appears on all my English wiki pages.
So that’s another way to display a banner—with more control over where it appears automatically and only if it matches certain conditions.

That’s it for today! I hope you’ve enjoyed this Tiki Express Tutorial.
Good feedback and comments keep coming in—thank you, that’s very helpful.

Having solved most of the technical aspects for my video tutorials, I will publish more often and get into the expected tutorials about installing Tiki, setting up a WikiSuite server, using Trackers, using CustomSearch, using the Maps features, and diving into advanced usage for those too.

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Thanks again for watching, and may the power of Tiki be with you!

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