Drupal

What is hotlinking?

Hotlinking, sometimes called image leeching or hot linking, is where another website embeds an image which is stored on your web host. So, for example, if you want to add an image to your website, you can upload the file to your web host then embed the image into your HTML referencing the source for the image as the location of the file on your web host. When someone accesses the HTML page where the image is embedded the file will be downloaded from your web host. If you don't protect against hotlinking, someone could embed that same image on their web page, which means that every time someone accesses their page, the image will be downloaded from your web host and drain your bandwidth. Don't do this, it's not cool and some sites see it as stealing.

Drupal 6 was released today! After having a play with the beta and release candidates...well, I don't have to say; this really is a phenomenal release! Here are some of my favourite new features which I'm looking forward to using:

• Extended logging - You can set Drupal for OS level logging
• Batch API - A progress bar can track tasks running in the background through multiple HTTP requests
• Scripting from the command line - This is really cool! You can now run Drupal code through the command line
• Forum improvements - Granular permissions can allow more control over forum moderation
• Sticky table headers - Does what it says on the tin
• Drag and drop features - Again, the tin...
• CSS only theming - Define regions etc. in .info files without writing any php code, then set styles in CSS

Well done to everyone who has been clearly working hard on this!

It's incredible how rapid the development of Drupal has become. Drupal 6 is only just around the corner and we're already talking about what improvements and features we'd like to see in Drupal 7! Drupal 5 has been absolutely fantastic. I've found it not only a great content management system, but also an excellent framework for building applications.

Anyone who wishes to officially request a new feature for Drupal 7 may do so on the Drupal website by submitting a new issue. Some things I'd like to see would be:

• Some kind of media management system - not just for images, video and audio but maybe also PDFs and other attachable or embedded content
• More core forum features
• Built in WYSIWYG editor as I almost always use TinyMCE, which is great, but it would be nice not to have to install and upgrade it separately from the core
• Improved node access control system
• Automatic upgrade of core system and modules
• Site backup for both files and database

As of Drupal 5.6 you will no longer be able to install the CMS onto a server with register_globals enabled. The notice on the Drupal website says:

"We no longer support servers with the PHP directive register_globals set to on. Attempts to install Drupal 5.6 when register_globals is enabled will fail. Current installations will continue to function, but will display an error on administration pages and the status report."

This check was introduced as a fix for the Cross site scripting vulnerability (DRUPAL-SA-2008-007) which occurs when register_globals is enabled. I was upgrading my Drupal installation from 5.5 when I found out so I only suffered the error on the status report, but people running a fresh install will find they can’t go any further until they disable register_globals.

I ran into a spot of trouble recently with img_assist, in that it only displayed alt text if there was also a caption below the image. Img_Assist takes the alt text from a combination of the title and description, and these fields are filled by default from the title and body of the image node. Although there is no real need for a caption below each image, you will almost always need alt text.