• RFC 977 - Network News Transfer Protocol
• RFC 2980 - Common NNTP Extensions
• RFC 2822 - Internet Message Format
• RFC 1036 - Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages

To install PHP News Reader, please check the Requirements, and then read the Installation Guide.

PHP News Reader has nothing to do with the user registration. It is designed to work with the EXISTING authentication system. PHP News Reader supports several flexible authentication modules, which let administrator easy to control how to authenticate users. There are various built-in authentication modules.

• POP3 - authenticate user using the existing POP3 server.
• Mail - authenticate user using multiple POP3/POP3S servers.
• LDAP - authenticate user using LDAP server.
• FTP - authenticate user with the existing FTP server
• MySQL - authenticate user existing in MySQL database.
• PostgreSQL - authenticate user existing in PostgreSQL database.
• NNTP - authenticate user using NNTP server. (version >= 2.2.1)
• NNTPS - authenticate user using NNTP over SSL server. (version >= 2.4.0)
• POP3S - authenticate user using POP3 over SSL server. (version >= 2.4.1)
• FTPS - authenticate user using FTP over SSL server. (version >= 2.4.1)
• CAS - authenticate user using CAS. (version >= 2.3.0)
• phpBB - authenticate user with the existing phpBB bulletin board system (version >= 2.5.6)

And it is easy to write your authentication module to be used by PHP News Reader.

The login prompt can be configured as HTTP (as a popup window) or FORM (preferred) style.
Besides, if you already login on phpBB, one can also utilize the session without login again.

PHP News Reader supports multiple interface languages, including English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Français, Finnish, German, Italiano and Slovak. The preferred language of client's browser will be considered as the default language. And this can be switched any time and any where.

PHP News Reader also supports the on-the-fly coding conversion between Traditional Chinese (used in Taiwan) and Simplified Chinese (used in Mainland China).

The PHP iconv() function may not work on some old systems and it can not handle the conversion between Traditional and Simplified Chinese. So PHP News Reader use a self-implemented conversion system. The conversion between Chinese charsets (BIG5, GB2312 and Unicode/UTF-8) is natively supported. The charset of article is auto-converted to the preferred one while the selected charset of interface is different from the charset of the news articles. This conversion also effectives while posting, replying, forwarding and cross-posting articles. The posted articles will also be converted to the original charset of the news group.

PHP News Reader's development started around August 2001. And since 2005, I can only afford time to support the limited bug fixes and minor improvements. It needs a completely rewrite to support more advanced features.

The latest version of PHP News Reader is v2.6.5. Here is the release notes since v2.6.0:

PHP News Reader v2.6.5 (2007/01/01)

• Fixed the browser languages detection for zh-tw and zh-cn
• Added $CFG['referrer_enforcement'] to enforce the browsing to begin from $CFG['url_base'].
• Fixed the bug which unable to access the first category (thanks goudal)
• Added $CFG['article_numbering_reverse'] to change article number order.
• Added $CFG['advertise_*'] to place advertisement.

• Fixed possible XSS attack (thanks Nikolas Coukouma)
• Fixed the problem for doing authentication from http_user & http_pw
• Fixed CAS authentication error.

• Fixed for array_shift() as a return value in PHP 5.0.5

• $CFG['html_header'] and $CFG['html_footer'] are displayed when reading articles.
• The HTTP request header 'Accept-Language' issued by browser is now considered as the default language.
• MODE READER must be issued again after authentication on some news server.
• Fixed HTTPS handling in IIS.
• Fixed the possible loss of double quote in Subject input field under multi-bytes charsets.
• Add $CFG['auth_deny_user'] to deny certain users from login.

• Fixed the bug which perform invalid MODE READER before authentication.
• Attachment is now cached if $CFG['cache_dir'] is enabled.
• Fixed the bug which cause all attachment(s) not downloaded in v2.6.0.
• Fixed the downloading of attachment with filename contains special characters (again).
• $CFG['html_header'] or $CFG['html_footer'] can be a PHP script.
• Add a new feature to show all articles of current thread in one single page.
• $CFG['show_article_popup'] is deprecated.

• Experimental threading support ($CFG['thread_support'])
• Added $CFG['confirm_post'] and $CFG['confirm_forward'] to enable the confirmation for message posting.
• Fixed the wrong version-checking codes when enabling nntps.
• The line length limit of 'newsgroups.lst' has been expanded from 512 to 4096.
• Fixed the downloading of attachment with filename contains special characters. (by ogekuri)
• Clear session variables and reload the config file when switching between different instance.
• Bug fixed for posting article when a line begin with period. (by ogekuri)
• $CFG["show_newest_top"] is deprecated.
• Fixed the problem of attachment uploading in PHP 5.
• The line which exceeds the page width will be wrapped.
• Multiple 'group' directive are allowed in one category.
• All language strings ($strXXX) are renamed as $pnews_msg array.
• Hierarchical directories are used for storing cache and thread data.
• read-art.php/post-art.php/reply-art.php/forward-art.php/delete-art.php are renamed (trimming the '-art')
• Rewrite NNRP functions as a class object.

PHP News Reader applies GPL license, click here for a reference.

You are free to use and/or modify PHP News Reader under the GPL license.
And I am very appreciated if you share your comments and modification with me.

Acknowledgement:

Many people help the development of PHP News Reader, click here to know their contributions.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pnews/

Project Hosts on SourceForge:

Demonstration:

http://enews.urdada.net/  (in English)
http://webnews.urdada.net/  (tw.bbs.*, in Chinese/BIG5, with url_rewrite turning on)

Downloads:

Download the latest version from SourceForge: Source downloads

The latest version is also available from Subversion:

# svn co https://pnews.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/pnews/trunk/pnews

Installation Guide:

PHP News Reader - Installation and Configuration Guide

Forum:

https://sourceforge.net/forum/index.php?group_id=71412

Donation:

If you like PHP News Reader, and think it useful for your work, or even making profit from PHP News Reader, you can support me by donating money. But this is *NOT* required. Even without any donation, you can still use PHP News Reader under GPL license.

Make a donation: http://sourceforge.net/donate/index.php?group_id=71412

Author:

Shen Cheng-Da
Taipei, Taiwan

http://www.csie.nctu.edu.tw/~cdsheen/