ZnoteX

A complete website for your Open Tibia server.

Version 2.0.0 · Maintained by Open Games Community

Website · Source & releases · Themes · Plugins

About

ZnoteX is a full automatic account creator (AAC) and website for Open Tibia servers — account registration, character management, highscores, guilds, houses, a forum, a shop and an admin panel, all in one package. It is written in PHP with a simple procedural framework, so it is easy to read and easy to modify.

The original ZnoteX went unmaintained for roughly five years. This repository picks the project back up rather than starting over — we think it is the strongest foundation among the available Open Tibia AAC projects, and we intend to keep building on it.

Requirements


PHP	8.1 or newer — 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5 all supported
Database	MySQL or MariaDB
Required extension	`mysqli`
Optional extensions	`curl` (PayPal, reCaptcha, e-mail) · `openssl` (reCaptcha) · `gd` (guild images) · `apcu` (memory cache)

PHP 8.0 and older are not supported and will be refused at startup.

Optional: for e-mail verification and account recovery, download PHPMailer 6.x and extract it into the ZnoteX directory as a folder named PHPMailer.

Supported servers

Set $config['ServerEngine'] in config.php to match your server:

Server	`ServerEngine`
TFS 1.6	`TFS_16`
TFS 1.1 – 1.4.2	`TFS_10`
Canary / OTServBR-Global	`CANARY`
TFS 0.3.6+ / 0.4 / OTX	`TFS_03`
TFS 0.2.13+	`TFS_02`
OTHire	`OTHIRE`

TFS 1.0 is not supported.

Canary notes — two-factor authentication is unavailable (Canary's account table has nowhere to store it), and the shop uses Znote's own points system rather than Canary coins.

Web server stacks

You need Apache (or nginx) + PHP 8.1+ + MySQL/MariaDB. On Windows, any of these bundles work — just make sure you grab a build that ships PHP 8.1 or newer.

Stack	Download	Why pick it
Uniform Server (UniServerZ)	uniformserver.com · SourceForge	Portable and very light on resources. No installer — unzip and run, easy to move or back up. A great default for a home-hosted server.
XAMPP	apachefriends.org	The most popular and the easiest to set up. Includes phpMyAdmin. Changing PHP version means installing a different XAMPP build.
WampServer	wampserver.com	The fastest of the three, and you can switch PHP/MySQL versions from the tray icon. Heavy on RAM — MySQL has been seen using 5 GB+. Only worth it if the machine has memory to spare.

On a Linux VPS or shared hosting you do not need any of these. Just set the hosting panel to PHP 8.1 or newer (8.3 / 8.4 recommended).

Installation

The installer

Extract ZnoteX into your web directory and open /install/ in a browser. Six steps:


1. Requirements	PHP version, `mysqli`, and whether `engine/cache/` is writable
2. Database	Credentials, and a check that your OT server's own schema is already imported
3. Server	Which engine this site sits in front of, the site name and its URL
4. Schema	Imports `SQL/znote_schema.sql` — only the `znote_*` tables
5. Administrator	Creates an account and a character, and remembers the name
6. Finish	Writes `config.local.php` and locks the installer

Import your OT server's schema first. ZnoteX reads accounts and players; it has never created them and will not pretend to. Step 2 refuses to continue until they exist — importing TFS/Canary's own schema.sql afterwards would overwrite what the installer is about to write.

Step 5 creates a real, working administrator: the account, a character on it, and the password hashed the way login.php expects on your engine. Step 6 puts that account name in page_admin_access, so you can reach /admin/ the moment the installer finishes. It writes to config.local.php, not config.php — see below — though a checkbox on the last step will write the admin name into config.php instead if you prefer.

When it is done, delete the install/ folder. It refuses to run again on its own (step 6 leaves a lock file), but there is no reason to leave it on a public server.

config.php and config.local.php

config.php holds every default and every comment. config.local.php holds only what is specific to this install — database credentials, engine, site name, admin names — and is included last, so it wins.

That split is what makes updating painless: a new ZnoteX release can ship a new config.php without touching your settings. Keep config.local.php out of version control.

Most other settings are editable from Admin Panel → Settings without opening a file at all.

Installing by hand

If you would rather not use the installer, or it cannot write the config file:

Import your OT server's schema, then SQL/znote_schema.sql, into the same database.
Create config.local.php next to config.php:

<?php$config['sqlHost'] = '127.0.0.1';
$config['sqlUser'] = 'your_db_user';
$config['sqlPassword'] = 'your_db_password';
$config['sqlDatabase'] = 'your_db_name';
$config['ServerEngine'] = 'TFS_10'; // see "Supported servers" above$config['site_title'] = 'My Server';
$config['site_url'] = 'https://example.com/';
$config['page_admin_access'] = array('YourAccountName');

Make engine/cache/ writable by the web server.
Open the site. If anything is misconfigured, the page tells you what to fix.

Memory cache (APCu)

ZnoteX caches highscores, news and similar pages. It can keep that cache in files under engine/cache/, or in RAM via the APCu extension.

config.php ships with 'memory' => true, so a fresh install without APCu stops on every cached page with "Configuration error! APCu is not enabled." If you see that, you have two choices — install APCu, or switch to the file cache by putting this in config.local.php:

$config['cache']['memory'] = false;

The file cache needs no extension, works everywhere, and only requires engine/cache/ to be writable.

APCu is optional. It saves a few disk reads per request. On a local or low-traffic server you will not notice the difference — it is worth installing once you have real player traffic.

Installing APCu on Windows

Download from pecl.php.net/package/APCu/5.1.28 and click the DLL link. The build must match your PHP exactly — check yours with php -i or phpinfo():

Filename part	Comes from
`8.3`	your PHP version
`ts` / `nts`	Thread Safety — `enabled` means ts
`vs16` / `vs17`	Compiler — Visual C++ 2019 is `vs16`, 2022 is `vs17`
`x64` / `x86`	Architecture

Uniform Server is thread-safe, so with PHP 8.3 it needs php_apcu-5.1.28-8.3-ts-vs16-x64.zip. Most Windows guides say nts because that is what other stacks use — picking the wrong one means the DLL is ignored with no error.

Copy php_apcu.dll from the zip into your PHP extensions (or ext) folder — the path in extension_dir.
Add to your php.ini:
```
extension=apcu
apc.enabled=1
```
Uniform Server has no single php.ini: the web server reads php_production.ini or php_development.ini from core/php83/ depending on the mode it is running in.
Restart Apache, then set memory to true.

On Linux, pecl install apcu or your distribution's php-apcu package.

Already have players?

Open /special/ to convert an existing OT database for ZnoteX.

Coming from another AAC instead? Admin Panel → Settings → Convert SQL takes a MyAAC or Gesior2012 database dump and gives you back a ZnoteX conversion SQL — accounts, players, news, gallery and the rest. Tables ZnoteX has no equivalent for are preserved rather than dropped.

Upgrading

Replace everything exceptconfig.local.php, layouts/, plugins/ and engine/cache/. Then apply any new file in SQL/migrations/, and check Admin Panel → Plugins in case a plugin has an update waiting.

Features

Accounts & characters

Account registration, password and e-mail changes
E-mail verification and lost-account recovery
Two-factor authentication
reCaptcha anti-spam
Character creation with custom vocations, starting skills and towns
Starting items via the included Lua script
Soft character deletion, and hiding characters from the public list
Support helpdesk with tickets

Community

Forum — custom boards, guild boards, admin-only feedback board, level restrictions, outfit avatars, player positions, sticky / closed / hidden threads, and search
Guilds — create and disband, invites, ranks, nicknames, guild images and descriptions, war declarations and ongoing war tracking
Character profiles — vocation, level, guild, skills, full outfit and equipment display, achievements, deaths, quest progression and player comments

Server information

Highscores with vocation and skill filters
Latest deaths and latest kills
Server info page with PvP settings, rates and experience stages (from your config.lua and stages.xml)
Spells list with vocation filters (from spells.xml)
Item list (from items.xml)
Creature library and monster loot tables (from your data/monster/ folder)
Interactive world map from your OTClient .otmm minimap: drag, zoom, floor by floor
Houses list with town filters, house bidding, and direct purchase with shop points
Downloads page with client links and a connection guide

All of the above are uploaded once in Admin Panel → Server Info — no FTP, no pasting file contents into a public page.

Shop & payments

Database shop offers managed from the admin panel: items, premium days, gender change, name change, outfits, mounts, and custom types
Item market: buy and sell listings, item search, price comparison and transaction history
Payment gateways: PayPal, PagSeguro and PayGol (SMS)

Administration

New built-in admin control panel available at /admin/
Responsive sidebar layout with day/night theme switch
Dashboard with accounts, characters, online players, guilds, houses, shop points and moderation queues
Delete characters, ban characters and accounts
Change account passwords, grant in-game positions
Give shop points, edit player level and skills
Teleport one player or everyone to a town or position
Review in-game bug reports, helpdesk tickets and forum feedback
Shop Manager for adding, previewing, hiding and removing database shop offers
Shop Pending / History page for pending deliveries and completed orders
Moderate gallery uploads, post news and changelogs
Server Info pages that import config.lua, stages.xml, items.xml, spells.xml, your monster folder and an OTClient .otmm minimap
Convert a MyAAC or Gesior2012 database into ZnoteX from the panel
Rename characters, and search every page and setting from the top bar

Setup, themes & extensions

Six-step web installer at /install/ that checks requirements, verifies your OT schema is present, imports the ZnoteX tables, creates the first administrator and writes the config
Theme system: every theme is a folder of plain HTML and CSS under layouts/, switchable from the admin panel, with child themes and one-click install from a repository
Per-theme options edited from the panel: background image, logos, links, and an editable line of footer text — images can be uploaded, and are stored outside the theme so an update keeps them
Plugin system: add pages, admin pages, tables and behaviour from plugins/ with no core edit, install and update from the admin panel
Settings editor for most of config.php, and a menu builder for the site navigation
Maintenance mode that keeps administrators and the login page reachable

Performance

Built-in cache system that serves treated data from flat files instead of hitting MySQL on every page load

Admin Control Panel

Everything below lives at /admin/. Access is controlled by $config['page_admin_access'] in config.php. The panel is grouped the way the sidebar is.

Overview

Search — every page and every setting, by name or by what it does. Typing download reaches the client URL fields under Settings, not just a page whose title happens to match.
Dashboard — server and community at a glance: environment, recent accounts and characters, top point balances, open queues.
Visitors — traffic ZnoteX has been recording all along.

Content

News — write, edit and remove front-page articles, with a BBCode editor.
Changelog — the entries shown on the public changelog page.
Gallery — moderate player screenshot submissions.
Menus — build the site navigation without touching a template. A top-level entry is a category: a heading that opens its children rather than a link of its own, so it needs no URL.

Players

Accounts — search an account, see its characters, points and history.
Player Tools — punish, move, rename and maintain characters and their accounts.
Character Skills — read and rewrite level, vocation, health, mana and skills.

Server Info

Your server's own files, uploaded once here instead of pasted into public pages.

Server Information — upload config.lua, stages.xml, items.xml, spells.xml and your monster folder. Each one is parsed on upload and published to the page that uses it: serverinfo.php, items.php, spells.php, creatures.php and monster_loot.php. For the monsters, monsters.xml alone gives you the names; a .zip of data/monster/ also gives health, experience, speed and race.
Minimap — import the .otmm your OTClient/OTCv8 writes. ZnoteX converts it into map tiles and shows a pan/zoom viewer with floor arrows on Server Information. Nothing is rendered at all unless a minimap is imported.

config.lua is parsed on upload and never written to disk — it carries your MySQL password, and engine/XML/ is served by the web server. Only the whitelisted settings are kept.

Economy

Shop Manager — add, preview, hide and remove shop offers. They live in znote_shop_offers now, not in $config['shop_offers'].
Payments — gateways, credentials and the point packages players can buy.
Shop Pending / History — pending deliveries and completed purchases.
Character Auctions — ongoing, unclaimed and completed character sales.

Support

Bug Reports — triage in-game reports, reward reporters, publish changelogs.
Helpdesk — answer, close and delete support tickets.
Feedback Board — forum threads awaiting a staff reply.

Settings

Layout — switch theme, edit its options, browse and install themes from a repository.
Plugins — install, update, enable and disable what is in plugins/.
Settings — most of config.php, from the browser.
Convert SQL — upload a MyAAC or Gesior2012 database dump and download a ZnoteX conversion SQL. Tables ZnoteX has no equivalent for are kept rather than dropped, and each converted row is mapped back to the row it came from, so a conversion can be traced and re-run.

Themes

Every theme is a folder under layouts/. A theme is plain HTML and CSS — the PHP stays in ZnoteX, so editing one is editing markup, not untangling a template engine. layouts/default/ is the theme that ships; layouts/_example/ is a documented skeleton to copy.

Everything below is in Admin Panel → Layouts.

Switching. Every installed theme is listed with a screenshot, 12 per page. Click one to make it active. It applies to the public site only — the admin panel never changes.

Options. A theme declares its own settings in theme.json — a background image, its logos, social links, a tagline, a colour, an editable line of footer text. They appear under Options on that theme's card and are stored in the database, so you change them from the panel instead of editing the theme's files, and updating the theme cannot lose them.

An option of type image shows the current picture, its path, and an upload field. Uploads land in engine/img/theme/<theme>/, deliberately outside layouts/, so replacing or re-extracting a theme leaves them alone. An image that only exists inside a static stylesheet is reachable too: the option declares the CSS rule that places it and ZnoteX writes that into the page head, so no theme file has to change.

The footer option is one line of your own, rendered above the credits — the copyright and engine credits stay in the theme's files on purpose, not in the panel.

Installing one. Two ways:

Manually — unzip the theme folder into layouts/. It appears on the next page load.
From a repository — press Browse themes to list themes hosted elsewhere and install one with a button.

The repository is configured by $config['layout_repository'] in config.php, and points at this project's layouts branch by default. Downloads are refused unless the URL is https and its host is on allowed_hosts — a theme is code that runs on your server, so only point it at a repository you trust. The tooling that packages themes and regenerates a catalogue lives on the layouts branch, alongside the archives themselves.

Child themes. A theme can name another as its parent and override only the files it wants. The rest falls through to the parent, so a colour change is one stylesheet rather than a fork — and the parent can still be updated underneath it.

See layouts/README.md for the full contract.

Plugins

A plugin is a folder under plugins/ that adds public pages, admin pages, database tables and behaviour without editing a single ZnoteX file — so an update never costs you your work.

plugins/my_plugin/
plugin.json name, version, author, description [required]
plugin.php registers hooks
pages/<page>.php public page at page.php?plugin=my_plugin&p=<page>
admin/<mod>.php admin page, listed in the sidebar
install.sql tables, created on install
assets/ css, js, images

Everything below is in Admin Panel → Plugins.

Installing one. Download it, unzip the folder into plugins/, reload the panel, press Install. That runs its install.sql and switches it on. ZnoteX never downloads a plugin by itself: a plugin is PHP that runs on every page of your site, so putting the files there stays a deliberate act rather than a button.

Updating one. Replace the folder with the newer version. If its plugin.json carries a higher version than the one recorded at install time, an Update button appears and applies whatever the new version needs.

Removing one.Disable stops a plugin; Uninstall also forgets its version. Neither ever drops a table — removing a plugin for good means deleting its folder and dropping its tables yourself.

A plugin runs with the same privileges as the rest of the site, and nothing sandboxes it. Install plugins whose author you know or whose code you have read.

plugins/shop_coupons/ is a working example — redeemable codes that either credit shop points or take a percentage off the next purchase — and is commented as a tutorial. See plugins/README.md for the contract and the list of hooks.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome at github.com/Open-Games-Community/ZnoteX.

License

See LICENSE. Original ZnoteAAC modified by Alex renamed to ZnoteX; layout by Blackwolf (Snavy).

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
.github/workflows		.github/workflows
Lua		Lua
SQL		SQL
admin		admin
api		api
assets		assets
engine		engine
install		install
landing		landing
layouts		layouts
locale		locale
plugins		plugins
special		special
.editorconfig		.editorconfig
.gitattributes		.gitattributes
.gitignore		.gitignore
.htaccess		.htaccess
LICENSE		LICENSE
README.md		README.md
achievements.php		achievements.php
auctionChar.php		auctionChar.php
bans.php		bans.php
blank.php		blank.php
buypoints.php		buypoints.php
changelog.php		changelog.php
changepassword.php		changepassword.php
characterprofile.php		characterprofile.php
config.countries.php		config.countries.php
config.php		config.php
contact.php		contact.php
createcharacter.php		createcharacter.php
creatures.php		creatures.php
credits.php		credits.php
deaths.php		deaths.php
downloads.php		downloads.php
failed.php		failed.php
forum.php		forum.php
forum_search.php		forum_search.php
gallery.php		gallery.php
guilds.php		guilds.php
guildwar.php		guildwar.php
helpdesk.php		helpdesk.php
highscores.php		highscores.php
house.php		house.php
houses.php		houses.php
index.php		index.php
ipn.php		ipn.php
items.php		items.php
killers.php		killers.php
login.php		login.php
logout.php		logout.php
mailtest.php		mailtest.php
market.php		market.php
monster_loot.php		monster_loot.php
myaccount.php		myaccount.php
onlinelist.php		onlinelist.php
page.php		page.php
pagseguro_ipn.php		pagseguro_ipn.php
pagseguro_retorno.php		pagseguro_retorno.php
paygol_ipn.php		paygol_ipn.php
payment.php		payment.php
payment_webhook.php		payment_webhook.php
powergamers.php		powergamers.php
protected.php		protected.php
queststatus.php		queststatus.php
recovery.php		recovery.php
register.php		register.php
serverinfo.php		serverinfo.php
settings.php		settings.php
shop.php		shop.php
spells.php		spells.php
sub.php		sub.php
success.php		success.php
support.php		support.php
topguilds.php		topguilds.php
toponline.php		toponline.php
twofa.php		twofa.php
twtrNews.php		twtrNews.php
voting.php		voting.php

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ZnoteX

About

Requirements

Supported servers

Web server stacks

Installation

The installer

config.php and config.local.php

Installing by hand

Memory cache (APCu)

Installing APCu on Windows

Already have players?

Upgrading

Features

Admin Control Panel

Overview

Content

Players

Server Info

Economy

Support

Settings

Themes

Plugins

Contributing

License

About

Releases

Packages

Contributors

Languages

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ZnoteX

About

Requirements

Supported servers

Web server stacks

Installation

The installer

config.php and config.local.php

Installing by hand

Memory cache (APCu)

Installing APCu on Windows

Already have players?

Upgrading

Features

Admin Control Panel

Overview

Content

Players

Server Info

Economy

Support

Settings

Themes

Plugins

Contributing

License

About

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