What do the banners actually do?

[HeleneWallis]

I've always had the banners deactivated on my site because I wanted to control placement of content. But just to see what would happen, I activated one of them and it put a whole new sidebox onto the site, not just a banner. So evidently I have misunderstand what 'banners' are supposed to be. I don't want to continue playing with a live site, but does anyone have examples of sites where they have used the built in banners and I can see what they're supposed to do?

I've downloaded the Tableau template for my test installation of the new version, and enabling banners there doesn't seem to do anything. If they really are useful, I'll try to figure out what to do with them, but at the moment I don't see what they're good for.

[DrByte]

Sideboxes are "one" way of displaying ads/banners. There are 2 single-ad banner sideboxes, and a multiple-ad sidebox ("banner all" is its name).
You can also display full-width banners in the 4 places: header, top and bottom of your site content, and footer.

https://docs.zen-cart.com/user/admin/banner_ads/
https://docs.zen-cart.com/user/admin...anner_manager/

[HeleneWallis]

I found all the footer banners, by turning them on one at a time and refreshing the test installation. But then I added a header banner and nothing I do will make it display. I even typed in its location manually, since using the browse feature didn't save it. I told it to save the file in the banners folder. When that didn't work, I manually copied the image into the folder where the banner manager suggested it be saved. Still nothing. All the other banner images and sideboxes will display when they're turned on, but not the header banner.

[VDecalS]

I'm unable to get the HEADER banners to work either. Using 157C with cloned responsive template, default responsive template, or classic contemporary green.

[DrByte]

In a fresh v1.5.7 site using Responsive Classic, the 3 banners at the top of the page and 3 banners at the bottom of the page work just fine when you enable them in Layout Settings.

Using the default demo data I get the following when enabling Wide-Banners in all three top and all three bottom positions:

[DrByte]

If a template's tpl_header and tpl_main_page files have had the banner code hacked out of them by a template designer then naturally those banners won't display.

[VDecalS]

Thanks Dr. Byte.
"Groups are then specified in the Banner Display Groups settings in Admin > Configuration > Layout Settings. ".... as listed in both docs..
157C came with footer defaulted to Wide-Banners, which is why I only noticed footer working.

[HeleneWallis]

If a template's tpl_header and tpl_main_page files have had the banner code hacked out of them by a template designer then naturally those banners won't display.

Both files are identical to the installation version. And I am getting a header, sort of. Just the assigned title, no image, even though I get the message that the image has been inserted. So I'm going to just dump it and start over fresh.