HomePHP Page 4 - Security Images with PHP and ImageMagick
Conclusion - PHP
This article is intended to provide another look at Nathan Rohler's article that was recently published (the link is provided at the end of this article). His article illustrated how to use a database and PHP's image functions based on the GD library to create random security images. This article will demonstrate how to achieve the same goal (albeit with slightly different results) by using ImageMagick. I chose not to use hidden form fields and a database and instead opted for session variables, a much simpler and more efficient approach for our objective.
Hopefully this article demonstrated a more efficient way to handle the security image problem than the original by avoiding the use of a database and hidden form fields. A feature to be added would be a "bad word" filter. Content filtering is beyond the scope of this article, though, and if you feel that you need that feature, there are many open source PHP site engines available that have content filters built in that you could borrow from.
I also used PHP4 code to reflect more up-to-date coding practices and used ImageMagick through the command line to offer another method of creating the security image. You could easily replace the ImageMagick specific code with the GD specific code from the original article and use the method I explained in this article to generate security images using GD.
When troubleshooting this code, be sure that you have set permissions on the temp directory to 777 and that you have the correct path to convert in the command that is executed. Also be sure you have the right path to the font you wish to use and be aware that if you use a different font, you will surely have to tinker with the sizes of the text to make sure it is not too large or too small for the background.
Nathan Rohler's article can be accesssed at this link.
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