Unfortunately, I was unable to resolve the issues with using OpenX for my banner management at this time.  My page load times had spiraled up to 22 seconds or better, with a Cache system, on 6mbps connection.  Not good.

BannersManager is the most robust banner management system for Joomla that I have found yet.  The big drawback is the lack of reporting, but I don’t guess you can fault them in that they’re doing this inside someone else’s system as opposed to OpenX which is an independent system.

With BannersManager I was able to get my average cached page load time down to just over 1 second.  Un-cached times are averaging just under 4 seconds.  If you’re a purist, you want the whole page to load in under 2 seconds on a dial-up connection, but with the massive amount of information we have displayed I don’t think that’s going to be feasible.

So, in summation:

Pros

  • has seperate clients, ad positions, and banners for maximum flexibility
  • loads quickly

Cons

  • doesn’t send out reports to clients.  Bummer.