Since I have upgraded my site to Drupal 5 I have added to Captcha to get rid of the bloody spam comments. Originally I was going to just use the math or other basic captcha's to implement a very clean captcha.

But I was listening to Security Now, Leo and Steve were talking about reCaptcha which not only a allows the use of captcha, but also helps with other projects. Here is a quick snippet of what these projects are

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

So what they do is take these mis-converted words and use them as the captcha image and people responses are passed back to the projects to allow the projects to quickly fix up all the missing words that the OCR's couldn't get.

So if you do need to have captcha on your site, you might as well make it help other projects at the same time. So far for me it is working great. If you want to use recaptcha then you will find it at http://drupal.org/project/recaptcha

 

When developing a new site, for anyone you will generally have test and/or development version of a site. These sites are usually exact copies the live site, and from time to time you will copy the live database to these sites.

Usually when doing this you will go through the site and change some of the configuration values, like the gmap api number, and others like the path to payment gateways and credit card gateway indentification numbers to point to test versions of the payment gateways.

Generally doing this by hand you will miss some parameters, and have it really cause problems later. But there is an answer that will allow you to set these values automatically so that depending on the site, will be rewritten correctly everytime.

In the sites directory you will have a directory for each site, and a settings.php file in each of these directories. Just add to your test file the following

<?php
$conf = array(
  'site_mail' => '[email protected]',
  'ccard_clientid' => 'example_no',
  'ccard_url' => 'https://test.example.com/store/payment/ccard',
  'googlemap_api_key' => 'ABQIAAAAhfBLLoKUHq7LqQ2QBcWQ2hRCSo_fHprJOtfmhc0LOWj7Ebi-6BSINRQq0Kie8sAsQKjO1tEi-ZFxSw',
);
?>

This will override these values above and will mean that you will never need to change them again. 

Also to speed up the download and update of your local database quickly and if you have a ssh connection to your webserver, try the following.

ssh [email protected] mysqldump -udbuser -pdbpasswd drupaldb | mysql -ulocaldbuser -pdbpasswd localdrupaldb

If you put this into a small shell script it is just a simple command away.

One of the biggest problems with the node_access system is that the you can only really use 1 node access module at a time. So if you want to use simple_access and organic groups together, the access is not really going to work very well. In fact it is totally useless.

Their is the great node_arbitrator module which will allow modules to do this, but you need to use a new hook, that both simple access and og do not support, but both intend to support in the future. (I know that when I get a bit of time I will put it into simple access)