Drupal

Yesterday I had my fears confirmed about the Drupal Automatic Updates initiative. It requires sites to be able to modify core Drupal files. While this makes it easier to fix vulnerabilities, it is not something you want when your site is actually being attacked. The best way to protect against someone exploiting a vulnerability to modify your Drupal core files is to change the file permissions so that your site cannot modify them.

I have been hearing warnings for a while now that distributed services and JavaScript running in the browser are about to reach the point where no one will want to work on Drupal any more. That would be true if no one cared about vendor independence and future-proof investment. If you’re building a disposable site or afraid that your client will run out of work for you, it may not pay to worry about those things.

Dreditor is a browser extension that provides handy buttons for working with issues on drupal.org in a consistent way. The Safari extension is no longer being distributed, but you can build it yourself and install it as a custom extension. It does not require a developer certificate.

I recommend reading this article by Shawn McCabe of Acro Media.

Today I was listening to Talking Drupal #168. The topic was how to ensure that open source project developers can afford to provide updates to their users. As an open source developer myself, I have to disagree with the premise that we should support a distinction between users and developers. The projects that I develop for are the projects that I use. As a user-developer, I do not care how many users a project has. I care how many user-developers it has.

After some hard-coded links stopped working when I moved a site to a subdirectory, I wondered why Drupal doesn’t use a <base> tag and relative paths for URLs. According to a 2007 article by Barry Jaspan, the <base> tag was removed in version 4.7 for reasons he did not know.

I set up Dreamhost cron jobs to run drush cron for two different sites running Drupal 8.0.3. One of the cron jobs worked, but the other failed with a syntax error. Drupal 8 requires PHP 5.5.9 or later, and the default version of PHP for one of the sites was 5.4.42. Changing the default PHP version in .bash_profile and .bashrc did not fix the error.

If you add a private files directory after installing Drupal 8.0.3, you will get a warning on the status page saying it is not fully protected and to see https://www.drupal.org/SA-CORE-2013-003 for information about how to protect it with an .htaccess file. The message shows up even if the directory is not Web-accessible. Ignore it. The .htaccess file will be created automatically after caches are rebuilt.