Drupal Talk

18 09 2011 : I was wrong: It was not a leak in a Drupalsite.

I tweeted too fast, and wrong:

Site were the Dutch Government accidentally leaked its 2012 budget, is a Drupalsite. Yes #Drupal does not secure its files. Drupal for govs?

The mayor news outlets in the Netherlands did not link to the leaking site, but instead to the site that carried (a mirror of the) PDFS that were leaked as well as background information. I followed these links, without researching if these sites were the actual leaking sites. This site they, instead, linked to, is a Drupalsite. The one with the unprotected files was not.

So much for not investigating a little myself! The site that leaked the file, was an ASP (.net?) site.

I am sorry for this misinformation. And as said, tweeted too fast, did too little investigation and that makes me look stupid. I am glad for those that told me my mistake. And because I got married the next morning, writing this errata took more time then is appropriate. Sorry for that too.

As a bonus, and to make things up a little, some common Drupal leakages that I helped fix in clients projects. Obviously I have responsibilities (and even a few NDAs) so I don’t give names and urls.


29 05 2011 : Mailcatcher for Drupal and other PHP-applications - The simple version

This is an updated version of my earlier post. Since msmtp is no longer needed, things are a lot simpler, hence the new article.

Problem: on development (and test) you don’t want to send out mail. But you /do/ want to test it. You certainly don’t want to be in my shoes when a client called me, telling she recieved dozens of confused and angry mails from users on her site, after I fired up cron on my local development machine. And sent out approximately 3000 notification mails to users, with stuff like “new post for you: “W000t, fieldz0rz developmentz in CCK is workinggggg!” (I am making this up now. Allthough…. ;) ) Problem: when debugging mail, you want to inspect the headers and often (in case of multipart or HTML mail) the source too. Most emailclients are crap for that (and right so: who other then the odd mail/webdeveloper needs to inspect the source of a mail. ever?)

Solution: the brilliant Ruby application named mailcatcher. This is a simple SMTP server and sendmail replacement that shows the mails sent to it in a handy webapplication. The webapplication features debug-tools such as headers, and source displaying.

Screenshot of a Drupal password recorvery mail in Mailcatcher


28 05 2011 : Mailcatcher for Drupal and other PHP-applications

UPDATE Please see the version of this article, the latest malcatcher has its own sendmail replacement, making installation for PHP a lot simpler.

Problem: on development (and test) you don’t want to send out mail. But you /do/ want to test it. You certainly don’t want to be in my shoes when a client called me, telling she recieved dozens of confused and angry mails from users on her site, after I fired up cron on my local development machine. And sent out approximately 3000 notification mails to users, with stuff like “new post for you: “W000t, fieldz0rz developmentz in CCK is workinggggg!”. Not cool.

Problem: when debugging mail, you want to inspect the headers and the source (in case of multipart or HTML mail). Most emailclients are crap for that (and right so: who other then the odd mail/webdeveloper needs to inspect the source of a mail. ever?)

Solution: the brilliant Ruby application named mailcatcher. This is a simple SMTP server, which shows the mails sent to it, in a handy webapplication. The webapplication features debug-tools such as headers, and source displaying.

Screenshot of a Drupal password recorvery mail in Mailcatcher


16 03 2011 : Minor sidenotes for Tagadelic users, regarding SA-CONTRIB-2011-013

Tagadelic, Drupals tag-cloud module, was found with a security vulnerability.


03 02 2011 : Why I chose to disclose a security issue and not report it to Drupal securty team.

Okay. So I did not play nice. In fact, I probably brought quite some sites out there in trouble, by disclosing a Drupal security issue on Twitter, without mentioning it to the security Team.

I had several reasons for doing this.

  • I was frustrated. With this module, its code and it causing several ugly bugs in an already frustrating site. Being frustrated and having access to Twitter is never a good idea. More on this below.

31 12 2010 : Clean and maintainable pattern for blocks development in Drupal 6

Clean and maintainable pattern for blocks development in Drupal 6

Drupal7, has finally removed the confusing $op parameters from hooks. And replaced them with a family of related hooks instead; one hook per op.

Here is a way to achieve the same in Drupal 6; by building a simple router in hook_block().