HashOver 2.0 (development)

HashOver is a PHP comment system intended as a replacement for services like Disqus. HashOver is free and open source software, under the GNU Affero General Public License. HashOver adds a "comment section" to any website, by placing a few simple lines of JavaScript or PHP to the source code of any webpage. HashOver is a self-hosted system and allows completely anonymous comments to be posted, the only required information is the comment itself.

Notable Features

General	Customization	Advanced
Threaded replies	Multiple themes	Allows limited use of HTML
Comment editing & deletion	Customizable HTML	Multiple comment sorting methods
Likes & Dislikes	Comment layout template	Spam filtering
Popular comments section	Customizable CSS	Notification emails
Multiple languages	File format plugins	Comment RSS feeds
Automatic URL links	Authentication plugins	Referrer checking
Administration		Comment permalinks
Avatar icons		IP address blocking
Display remote images

Required modules/compilation

Although most PHP installations include everything HashOver requires by default, depending on your setup you may need to install some modules/extensions and/or ensure PHP was compiled with support for the following modules.

Feature	Module name(s)	Debian/Ubuntu package name(s)
Date and Time	date	part of PHP core
Document Object Model	dom	part of PHP core
Regular Expressions	pcre	part of PHP core
User information encryption	openssl	part of PHP core
Multi-byte character support	mbstring	php-mbstring
XML data storage format support	xml, libxml, SimpleXML	php-xml
JSON data storage format support	json	php-json

The following modules are optional

Feature	Module name(s)	Debian/Ubuntu package name(s)
PHP Data Objects	PDO	php-sqlite3, php-mysql
SQLite file format support	pdo_sqlite, sqlite3	php-sqlite3

Checking for required modules

On UNIX (GNU, BSD, etc) you may list which modules you have installed with this command...

php -m

HashOver on Windows

Windows will be officially supported by HashOver 2.0, there should not be any major issues with using HashOver on Windows. However, HashOver is primarily developed on and for UNIX operating systems, which are the primary operating systems used by the majority of web servers. If you have any issues with HashOver on Windows, please report them.

On Windows the command to list installed modules is...

php.exe -m

Important differences from version 1.0

hashover.php is no longer used in JavaScript tags, the file /hashover/comments.php is used instead.

So change:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/hashover.php"></script>

To:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/hashover/comments.php"></script>

HashOver 2.0 is object oriented, many things have changed places and been renamed. For normal users, about the only thing that is important to know is that the secrets.php file was merged with the settings.php file.

Important recent changes to version 2.0

The pages directory is now comments/threads, this change will cause existing comments to not appear until you move the directories under pages into the new comments/threads directory.
All JSON config files have been moved to the new config directory, you will need to move the files hashover/blocklist.json and hashover/ignored-queries.json into the new config directory. If these files do not exist, you don't need to do anything as these config files are completely optional.
The previously removed secrets.php file has returned. The required setup information, namely the notification e-mail address, encryption key, and the admin username and password are now stored in this secrets.php file located at /hashover/backend/classes/secrets.php.

You will need to move the values of the public properties $notificationEmail, $encryptionKey, $adminName, and $adminPassword in the settings.php file into the new secrets.php file, and remove these properties from settings.php or replace the settings.php file entirely, as its source code is publicly viewable, whereas the source code of secrets.php is not.

Focus of this release

HashOver version 1.0 consists of code written by one person over the course of five years, come March the 29th 2014. Moreover, HashOver was my first serious use of JavaScript and my first PHP project of such complexity. Those two facts should trigger obvious concerns about HashOver's performance, efficiency, and security. With that in mind, version 2.0 will be the next release, skipping 1.x releases all together, and will focus on improving nothing but the following areas.

Security
Performance [#61]
Code efficiency [#62]
Deployment
Data storage format [#32]
Backwards and forwards compatibility
Operating system support
Aesthetics and graphics [#4] [#11]
Graphic scalability on (xⁱ)HDPI displays [#4] [#11]
Code readability [#62] [#63]
Bug fixes

This means the possibility of new features in version 2.0 is next to null, and contributions via GitHub and/or e-mail that add new features will be rejected, at least for the time being. Improvements to existing functionality and aesthetics will be accepted. New features will be accepted and available in version 2.x releases.

Information and Documentation

Forthcoming.

Contributing

When sending a "Pull Request", committing code, or otherwise sending, submitting, or transmitting code in any other way, please place a GNU Affero General Public License notice or any compatible license notice at the top of the code (if one isn't already present) and assign your contribution's copyright to yourself or "Jacob Barkdull". This gives me the necessary rights to distribute your contribution in HashOver under the GNU Affero General Public License.

HashOver is partially written in JavaScript, plain, standard, non-jQuery JavaScript. If your contribution improves or adds new functionality to the JavaScipt portions of HashOver, your contribution must also be written in plain, standard, non-jQuery JavaScript. Contributions using or assuming the presence of jQuery, Underscore, AngularJS, Prototype, React, Node.js, or any other abstraction layer, library, and/or framework will be rejected.

linuxitux/hashover-next