You may have noticed my post about blog spam protection. Near the end of that post, I was looking for a good CAPTCHA plugin for my blog publishing system. I looked for one that was good for me but I did not find one. I decided to create my own.
First, I had a look at what makes a good CAPTCHA. There a many bad ones that are used on the web right now. YAHOO had his broken recently and it seems like Windows Live got into trouble too. It seems like segmentation is the culprit in computer character recognition these days.
I found this Russian guy, who created a relatively good CAPTCHA called KCAPTCHA with PHP. I choose his code as the foundation of my project. All I had to do was to integrate his code into a plugin.
I never developed any application with PHP. It is not that I do not like, but it never was on my path. I got my two hands into it. I did not have to learn it in order to complete my plugin. It was like riding a bike after a few years where you never touched it. It felt natural. I have been developing web applications for quite a while now so I know what they have to manage.
I used WampServer and Komodo Edit in order to test, develop and debug my plugin. I must say that those tools ease a lot of common and tedious installation and development problems.
The project is released under GPL version 2. It is not the first time that I release code on the internet but it is my first with GPL. It feels like the right thing to do.
The final result is yaCAPTCHA. Have a look.
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