The LambCutlet Disorganisation

Gosh aren’t we lucky today, more than one piece in a day of WordPress stupidity from yours truly! ;) This time however, it is in the form of a plugin and is primarily aimed at those wanting Google AdSense to be WordPress theme aware as they have a theme selector or some such, or are using content negotiation to serve up XHTML as application/xhtml+xml via my method.

For the latter, as you may well be (un-)aware, Google’s AdSense code does not play nicely in such situations so the current work-around is to use an <object> element, which then references an HTML file sent as text/html, and it is this document which contains all the fancy Google AdSense JavaScript.

Just download google-adsense.tar.gz and extract it. Edit google.html and put the relavant JavaScript variables for your account into it, save it and then put this in the directory of your current active theme, say ./wp-content/themes/your-theme/. Next, place the file google-adsense.php into ./wp-content/plugins/ and activate the plugin. To insert an AdSense block, the most basic template tag for it is:

<?php google_adsense(); ?>

In text/html mode (the plugin figures this out automagically), the ./wp-content/themes/your-theme/google.html file is read and just the important AdSense bit is output into your page, something resembling this in fact:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "MY_CLIENT_ID";
google_ad_width = 728;
google_ad_height = 90;
google_ad_format = "728x90_as";
google_ad_type = "text_image";
google_ad_channel ="";
//--></script>
<script type="text/javascript"
  src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>

In application/xhtml+xml mode (anything other than text/html or text/plain to be precise), it will output an <object> which references to ./wp-content/themes/your-theme/google.html, something like so:

<object data="http://domain.tld/wp-content/themes/your-theme/google.html" type="text/html"></object>

Obviously, if you are using more than one theme, then the google.html template needs to be in those themes directories too! The template function also accepts a parameter, which appends a suffix to the template file it’s trying to use. A basic example would be:

<?php google_adsense('leaderboard'); ?>

… and:

<?php google_adsense('skyscraper'); ?>

Instead of looking for [THEME_PATH]/google.html, the above two examples will look for [THEME_PATH]/google-leaderboard.html and [THEME_PATH]/google-skyscraper.html respectively. What CSS to apply to your placed AdSense I’ll leave completely up to you as one man’s meat is another’s cabbage.

So that’s basically it, happy WordPress plugging-ining and Google AdSense (XHTML or otherwise) advert-serving! :D