What is PHP?
PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.
What is MySQL?
The world's most popular open source database.
What is the GD library?
GD is an open source code library for the dynamic creation of images by programmers. GD is written in C, and "wrappers" are available for Perl, PHP and other languages. GD creates PNG, JPEG and GIF images, among other formats. GD is commonly used to generate charts, graphics, thumbnails, and most anything else, on the fly. While not restricted to use on the web, the most common applications of GD involve web site development.
Requirements
EBA-News uses new PHP functionality because of security reasons, which means you need an updated PHP installation on your server to make sure it runs smoothly.
PHP Version 4.3.0 or greater
EBA-News needs sha1 in order to generate password hashes. All passwords are stored as 40-character hexadecimal numbers. Since PHP 4.1.0, superglobal arrays such as $_GET , $_POST, and $_SERVER, etc. have been available. These are an important part of keeping the high security.
Read more about password hashing:
- sha1 — Calculate the sha1 hash of a string
- md5 — Calculate the md5 hash of a string
- RFC 1321 — The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm
- RFC 3174 — US Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA1)
MySQL 4.1 or greater
There are lots of news mangement system using flat files to store data. This requires more code than when using databases and is not very user-friendly. EBA-News, on the other hand, requires a MySQL Database ver. 4.1 or greater. All data and preferences will be stored in the database. Older MySQL versions may work, but haven't been tested and are not officially supported.
GD 1.6 or greater
Uploading images using PHP has become a complex task over the last years because of copyright issues. There are mainly three image formats to work with: PNG, JPEG and GIF. All are widely-used and should be supported. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Versions of GD older than 1.5, support GIF format images, but not PNG images. Versions greater than 1.6 and less than 2.0.28, however, support PNG, but not GIF. GIF support was re-enabled in 2.0.28 along with PNG.
While GIF Images are widely-used and popular, we've decided not to support it. Instead, you should use JPG or PNG. We've come to this conclusion based on the fact that PNG really has three main advantages over GIF:
- Alpha Transparency
- Gamma Correction (control of image brightness and color correction)
- Two-dimensional interlacing (a method of progressive display)
There are still some issues that you should be aware of. Versions of Internet Explorer prior to 7 don't support PNG functionality like alpha channels allowing users to use variable transparency. This has been resolved in version 7.