DCW Digital Certification Portal

DCW's Digital Certification Portal is a highly secure, lightweight, and monolithic PHP application designed to bulk generate and distribute verifiable digital certificates. Originally designed to issue verifiable credentials to participants in DCW events, this application allows communities, educational institutions, and organisations to handle end-to-end credential workflows without relying on expensive SaaS infrastructure like Credly.

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Core Features

• Drag-and-Drop Visual Editor: A powerful built-in PDF editor. Upload a blank PDF template and visually map dynamic text fields (Participant Name, Credential ID, Issue Date) and a customizable, brand-colored QR code directly onto the canvas.
• Bulk CSV Processing: Effortlessly import hundreds of participants at once using a standardized CSV upload system.
• Event & Role Isolation: Manage multiple events simultaneously. Create distinct roles (e.g., Speaker, Volunteer, Attendee) within each event, allowing for role-specific PDF templates.
• Public Verification Portal: Includes a public-facing validation endpoint. Anyone can scan a certificate's QR code to instantly verify its authenticity against the central database.
• 1-Click LinkedIn Integration: Generated certificates provide participants with a dynamic "Add to LinkedIn Profile" button that securely pre-fills their credential data.
• Enterprise-Grade Security: Hardened against SQL Injection (PDO prepared statements), CSRF attacks (strict token verification on state-changing endpoints), Session Fixation, and Brute-Force authentication attempts (server-side delays).

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🌍 Adapting for Your Community (White-Labeling)

This portal is built to be instantly adaptable by other Wikimedia chapters, educational institutions, or organizations. We have decoupled all organization-specific assets so you can fork and use this software without dealing with messy merge conflicts.

• How to White-Label for your Organization: A simple 4-step guide on configuring your custom URLs, changing the logo, and setting the default language.
• Translation & i18n Guide: A complete guide on how to add a new language bundle to the portal (fully compatible with Translatewiki.net).

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Architecture & Tech Stack

This platform is intentionally built without heavy frameworks to ensure maximum portability across standard shared-hosting environments (cPanel/Hostinger) and minimal dependency overhead.

• Backend Logic: PHP 8.x (Vanilla)
• Database Layer: MySQL / MariaDB (via PDO)
• PDF Generation Engine: FPDI & TCPDF
• Frontend UI: HTML5, CSS3, Vanilla JavaScript (Zero-build pipeline)

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Quick Start Guide

1. Requirements

Ensure your server or local environment has PHP 8.0+ installed with the pdo_mysql, gd, and mbstring extensions enabled.

2. Clone & Setup

Clone the repository to your server's public directory (or htdocs):

git clone https://github.com/Deoband-Community-Wikimedia/dcw-certificate-portal.git
cd dcw-certificate-portal

3. Database Initialization

1. Create a new, empty MySQL database.
2. Import the database.sql schema file located in the root directory. This provisions the necessary tables and creates the default administrator account.

4. Configuration

Duplicate the example configuration file:

cp config.example.php config.php

Open config.php and map it to your newly created database:

$host = 'localhost';
$db   = 'your_database_name';
$user = 'your_database_user';
$pass = 'your_database_password';

5. File System Permissions

The application requires write access to generate and store PDF assets. Ensure the uploads/ directory has proper write permissions:

chmod -R 755 uploads/

6. First Login

Boot up your server (or run php -S localhost:8000 locally) and navigate to the admin dashboard:

• URL: http://localhost:8000/admin/login.php
• Default Username: admin
• Default Password: password123

[CAUTION] Security Warning: These credentials are published in this repository and in database.sql, so anyone can read them. They exist only so that a brand-new operator can log in once. Go straight to the "Manage Users" tab and change the password before the portal is reachable from the internet.

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Production Security

For live production deployments, you must prevent public HTTP access to sensitive configuration files. An .htaccess file is included in this repository to automatically block access to config.php and .git/ directories on Apache servers. If you are deploying on Nginx, you must manually implement equivalent deny all; blocks in your server block configuration.

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Contributing

We welcome pull requests, bug reports, and feature ideas, including from people who have never contributed to an open source project before.

CONTRIBUTING.md has everything you need: local setup, the coding standards reviewers check for, how to handle a database schema change, and what happens after you open a pull request. TESTING.md covers what to test and how.

In short: fork the repository, branch off main, and open a pull request against main. All new code must use PDO prepared statements for database queries, include a CSRF token on every POST form, and escape anything echoed to the page.

By taking part you agree to follow our Code of Conduct.

Found a security problem?

Please don't open a public issue. SECURITY.md explains how to report it privately.

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Author

Zaid Sayyed and other DCW volunteers

See CONTRIBUTORS.md for the full list of project contributors.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.