Microdata Cataloging Tool (NADA)

This document provides security guidelines and a checklist to assist with managing a NADA site.

Disclaimer: These are general guidelines and are not intended to be an exhaustive guide to server security. The implementation and enforcement of server security and organizational processes to ensure your site and information are secure remains your responsibility.

NADA 5.0 was released on 11 January 2019.
This is a substantial upgrade to NADA which brings a host of new features as well as upgrades which address compatibility issues with recent updates to PHP.

Why upgrade?
• Previous versions of NADA were built to be compatible with the latest versions of PHP available at the time. These were PHP 5.3 up to 5.6.
• Support for PHP 5 was discontinued in December 2018.
• The maintainers of PHP encourage all users of PHP to upgrade to PHP 7.1 +
• NADA 5.0 has been rewritten to run on PHP 7.1 +

It is strongly recommended that all users of NADA upgrade to the latest version of PHP. Upgrading PHP to version 7.1 + will necessitate that you also upgrade your NADA to 5.0.

What is new in NADA 5.0?

• Adobe Flash uploads are now replace with HTML 5 uploads. This fixes changes made in most modern browsers which remove default support for Flash.
• PHP no longer supports MySQL drivers. Support for MySQL has been replaced with the MySQLi and MySQL PDO drivers. NADA 5 supports these new drivers.
• NADA now uses Bootstrap 4. This means that NADA uses a responsive design that works well on all devices, including mobile devices.
• The framework underlying NADA now runs on the latest version of CodeIgnitor.

Exciting new functionality in NADA 5.0

• Search has been updated to allow indexing of all the metadata fields.
• The templating system has been update to accommodate all DDI.2.5 fields. The previous version of NADA only supported a subset of the DDI Codebook.
• A more powerful API is available which allows searching, browsing and managing the catalog via API.

NADA 5.0 lays the ground work for a number of new features which will be released in upcomming versions of NADA. Some of these are:

• Support for data types and metadata standards other than survey data (microdata). Such as Geospatial and Time Series data.
• A data API
• More advanced Semantic search

The latest release of NADA can be obtained from the IHSN Github repository located here:
Most users will want to download zipped versions of the release located here:

For instructions on how to of upgrade to NADA 5.0 see the documentation provided here: https://nada.readthedocs.io/en/v5.0/installation-guide.html
To contact us for questions about upgrading or to provide feedback contact our helpdesk at the IHSN: tickets@ihsn.uservoice.com