December 15, 2007
Yasashii Syndicate Announces KittoKittoKitto 1.3.0
Calgary, Alberta (Yasashiisyndicate.org) - A few days ago, the Yasashii Syndicate released the first production-quality version of KittoKittoKitto, the open-source virtual pet game, similar to the popular Neopets.com game. Kitto is the most significant product released by the Syndicate to date, with nearly four months of development time invested, resulting in over six thousand lines of code.
“The new software framework written by Mr. Evans, KittoKittoKitto, will provide a basis on which many individuals will increase their skills in programming and set an example of coding excellence,” said Syndicate Chairman Stacey Ell in front of his home in Saskatchewan. “In addition to increasing the skills of starting programmers, it will also attract more people into the field. The world depends more and more on the software running behind the scenes. I hope KittoKittoKitto makes a difference.”
The Kitto release also marks another first in Syndicate history: cooperation with Lyghtspeed Solutions. Lyghtspeed has provided hosting for the Kitto project since it was first publicly announced and has provided invaluable bug reports and feedback throughout the entire development process.
What Is Kitto?
KittoKittoKitto is an open-source (licensed under the GPL v3) virtual pet site application, providing all of the basic functionality you need to start a virtual pet game. It is targeted towards those who are proficient with PHP or are trying to learn PHP. Kitto is purely object-oriented and adheres to the MVC pattern, making it an excellent package to begin learning PHP with.
Its goals are simple:
- Help new petgame developers get off the ground as quickly as possible. All of the essentials are ready to be used, including user management and adopting virtual pets. Developers may proceed with adding new and unique elements into the game without the time-consuming process of implementing their own frameworks.
- Help educate brand-new and novice programmers by giving them a well-designed application to hack away at. The code in Kitto will serve as an excellent example of best practices and DRY code to the next generation of pet-game developers.
What features does Kitto provide?
- Complete user system (register, login, logout, forgot password, preferences, avatars, titles, timezones and date formats, profiles, ban/unban, permissions).
- Forums with moderation abilities and ’secret’ permission-based boards/categories.
- News page with comments.
- Private-messaging system supporting a variable-number of CCs.
- Adopt pet / Abandon Pet, pet profiles, feed/play/paint pet.
- Extensible item system (the actions it ships with are use, give, and destroy item) with stacking. Kitto comes with support for toy items, food items, and paint items.
- NPC-owned shops and configurable restocks.
- Complete administrative back-end and granular user permissions.
- It’s own psudeo-cron system.
- No BBCode implementation - everything uses HTML instead of making your users learn Yet Another Markup Language.
- Kitto integrates the TinyMCE editor - the same editor found in Wordpress - to make styling their text easy. Users do not even need to know HTML!
What About Security?
Kitto takes advantage of several things to mitigate the possibility of flaws:
- Kitto is hardened against SQL injection attacks, thanks to its use of the ActiveTable library. ActiveTable deals with doing the appropriate quoting for the RDBMS you are connected to without any work on the part of the developer.
- Kitto uses HTMLPurifier to validate and strip malicious code from user-provided HTML.
- Kitto is resilient to cookie stealing attacks. It ties the password cookie’s hash to an IP address and places a time limit on how long the particular hash is considered valid. The hashes stored in cookies are temporary, throw-away, salted hashes, making them virtually immune to rainbow table attacks.
About Lyghtspeed Solutions
Lyghtspeed has been a leader in online services since the beginning of 2007. Their flagship products, Rescreatu and Virtual Pet List, bring in hundreds of thousands of page views per day and are both supported by active, friendly user communities.
About The Yasashii Syndicate
The Yasashii Syndicate, otherwise known as the Gentle Syndicate, is an organization dedicated to its execution of The Sekrit Plan. The Sekrit Plan’s goals, to outsiders, seem strange and mysterious. To syndicate members, however, The Sekrit Plan makes perfect fucking sense.
For more information about the Yasashii Syndicate, please see yasashiisyndicate.org/about.
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KittoKittoWiki, the gateway to all Kitto-related resources and downloads, including the full source code for Kitto.
Kitto Live Demo
Filed by OwlManAtt at 10:34 pm under Projects, Syndicate
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