Drupal's PHP filter enables users to use raw PHP code in text fields. While this
is an extremely powerful ability, it quickly leads to serious security issues.
Users with the ability to insert PHP code into your site, can practically do
anything they want with your site. Also the PHP code is stored in the database
and lives outside of your normal workflow. My Insert PHP module tries to fix
the limitations of the PHP filter and provides a safer way to include raw PHP in
your Drupal site.
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Setting up the Alternative PHP Cache on Ubuntu
As some of you might know, PHP scripts are compiled to bytecode right before
they are executed. This process costs time and server resources. Also this is
done all over again every single time your script gets executed, even if your
script hasn't been changed in years. So what could be more obvious than caching
the results of the compilation to reduce load on your server. Today I want to
show you one way of achieving this, with a little help from the Alternative PHP
Cache (APC).
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Protect Folders and Files using .htaccess
Not all folders and files in your webfolder should be accessible to anyone.
Configuration or debug informations should be kept secret. Also it can be
pretty annoying if crawlers keep ignoring the rules from your robots.txt and
just index and list all files they find. In this article I will explain to you
how you can restrict access to files and folders.
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Google PageSpeed - Installation on Ubuntu
Since 2011 Google provides an Apache module called Google PageSpeed. This
module has some nice features, which can reduce the load time of your website
significantly. In this article I want to show you how to install PageSpeed on
Ubuntu, give you an example of a configuration and some tips, which may help
you get going.
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Drupal: Maintenance Node
Drupal has somewhat limited options, when it comes to displaying information
during site maintenance. By default admins may enter a simple maintenance
message. Most of the times this is just enough, but sometimes you want to
be able to make the maintenance page look more appealing. For this reason I
developed a Maintenance Node module.
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