Clean URLs are almost taken for granted. Drupal 6 enables them automatically if certain requirements are met. "Dirty URLs" contain a "?" and used to prevent some "spiders" from "crawling" your site effectively.

There are many reasons for running a copy of a Drupal website on a local machine among them backup, offline development or more likely a perverse desire to show that it can be done. The perversity is hightened by doing this on a Windows machine, in this case Windows XP. This case study is based on the real world user "varley" and the site "vekon.com". You may get your case to work with appropriate substitions.

Woke up this morning to find the home page - http://ls.net/ in a bad way. The cause was apparent, a user had posted an event which contained HTML code that broke the rest of the page.

Following the path of least resistance, I had set the default format to full HTML. PHP should only be enabled for people you can reach with a baseball bat. We have adopted several PHP restrictions to improve security but the power of PHP in malicious or casual hands is a loose cannon.

Moving from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 has been a bit like giving birth to an elephant. Not only has the gestation period been long but the back labor has been particularly painful. There are still loose ends but this announcement of CiviCRM 2.1 clears the way for membership organizations to take a serious look at Drupal 6.

usage: install_drupal user pass domain dbpass pdname

This script will create a user, apache2 configuration, dns configuration and a user file system read to invoke the Drupal install script;

By default, Drupal's HTML filter strips tags which WYSIWYG editors like FCKeditor produces. To enable Drupal to render content in a manner consistent with the intent of authors using a WYSIWYG you can either make the default Input Format Full HTML or add tags to the filter at admin/settings/filters/1/configure.

Some modules require regularly scheduled actions, such as cleaning up log files. Using cron can make these happen automatically.

starbuck@helen:~/public_html$ crontab -l
# m h  dom mon dow   command
15 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -O - -q http://starbuck.net/cron.php

If your Drupal site is hosted at LS.Net and admin/logs/status doesn't show a recent "Cron maintenance tasks",  contact the webmaster and have him set up a crontab like the one above.