[Decrypt seed=abcd]Any Text[/Decrypt]

Decrypts text which was encrypted with [Encrypt].

To convert text from encrypted to plain, put it inside a [Decrypt] context.

Example (normally you would put the following text into a .tpl file on your server and use a web browser to link to it):

[Decrypt seed=abcdefg];)(*&#$KLJFLKjkhegdlksdfg09814[/Decrypt]<br>

Try It!

In the example above, pre-encrypted text is decrypted and displayed it as it was before:

Some Text that is private

Use [Encrypt] to encode the text. To decrypt a sequence of text, you must set the seed value to exactly the same as when you encrypted it. The seed may be a sequence of up to 8 characters (anything you can type on the keyboard, except '&' or '=' or '[' or ']'). Do not ever let anyone know what the seed value is, because that would allow them to decrypt the text.

This context is most often used to retrieve passwords from a database (such as WebCatalog's own Users.db), so that in the unlikely event that someone is able to download the file, the passwords will be unreadable.

Note: If you're worried that someone can download a copy of WebCatalog and use it to decrypt your passwords, don't be. Even if someone manages to get your Users.db file (which is very hard to do, because the web server won't allow it to be sent to a browser), the passwords in Users.db are encrypted in such a way that they cannot be decrypted, even by WebCatalog itself. WebCatalog always compares these passwords in their encrypted form when checking for ADMIN priveleges, and the passwords are never decoded into plain-text. Even Pacific Coast Software cannot decrypt your Users.db file.

However: you must never allow your seed text to become public, because when you specify a seed value in the Encrypt/Decrypt contexts, that seed could be used by someone with WebCatalog to decrypt text. So safeguard your template files by making sure that no other CGI or plugin can display them as plain-text without being first processed by WebCatalog.