N2F Yverdon: Using Securimage PHP CAPTCHA
Most people building a website today are familiar with the need to have a CAPTCHA on their site. For years I’ve had a set of small functions I built for the purpose of easily fulfilling this request for clients and internal sites. The solution worked but it was poorly packaged and never improved upon.
I recently started doing a site for a friend and as usual found the need for a CAPTCHA on the contact form. Given how many projects I have going on, I decided it was time to give up and see if the PHP community had any better solution than my couple of functions. Sure enough, someone has built a pretty useful CAPTCHA system. Securimage, built by drew010, is a simple CAPTCHA class that allows you to even do audio files of the CAPTCHA’s text. Within 10 minutes I had it working as an extension in N2F Yverdon v0.2 RC, so I thought I’d share the fruits of my minimal labor to get this great utility working.
The above download is a ZIP with the extension already setup with the proper file paths (you should be able to just drag the system folder in the zip into the root directory of your install). The only caveat about this setup is that you will need the securimage extensions directory to be accessible, but you can use virtual directories to do this and change the constants I’ve defined in securimage.ext.php. As a quick example of usage, here’s what it looks like in a page.php:
<?php
global $n2f;
if (!$n2f->hasExtension('securimage')) {
$n2f->loadExtension('securimage');
}
$si = new Securimage();
?>
<img id="captcha" src="<?php echo SI_IMAGE_PATH;?>" alt="CAPTCHA Image" />
<a href="<?php echo SI_AUDIO_PATH;?>" style="font-size: 13px">(Audio)</a>
Obviously this won’t do much, but it does show you how it works (as well as how to include the audio feature). When we release Yverdon v0.2 and the new site, I’ll put up some proper documentation for this extension.
- Andrew