I’ve recently taken on a job that requires modification of a web site built on Drupal, and 3 days in, I feel like I need a 2 week holiday.

Drupal, and its counterpart, Joomla, are Open Source Content Management systems. The idea is that the allow people who don’t know anything about HTML, PHP, Javascript etc etc to build complex, feature rich websites.

Their use on the web has exploded over recent years, as more and more would be ‘web designers’ have started using them as their framework for building websites.

This in turn as led to the development of lots and lots of Drupal plugins and widgets, which add a futher layer of fudge and complexity to something that is already very fudgy and very complex.

Under the hood, its a morass.

Before starting work on the modifications I had to make, I took a look at the MySQL database on which is runs. It had 288 tables (my own CMS has 12 tables, and even poor old Wordpress only has about 40 tables).

If that wasn’t bad enough, when I then tried to run a local copy of the website on my laptop, I started to get errors about PHP not having enough memory to run the Drupal scripts. PHP is normally allocated about 16MB of memory as part of its installation; to run Drupal, I had to up this to 64MB!!

Its gets worse. Looking at the raw HTML generated by Drupal, I saw that it was loading 25 different CSS files, and 14 different Javascript files! And when I examined the DOM via Firebug, I could see that certain elements were taking CSS properties from up to 4 different files!

All this was bad enough, but it was nothing comparred to actually using the management interface to build content. The admin menu in Drupal has 14 different options, and each of these has a plethora of sub options, all of which refer to vague concepts like Blocks, Views, Modules, Panels, Stories etc (they also refer to a Page, but its isn’t really clear what a Page is).

My first thought was that it would be actually easier to learn HTML, PHP and Javascript than try and unravel this crap.

I persevered anyway. I made a view changes to pages where I could figure how to make those changes, but none of them appeared on the actual website. This was most probably to do with caching I thought, but there was nothing in the Drupal interface that said ‘You should clear your cache to see these changes’. I also thought  it was quite odd that an app that generates links to 40 odd CSS and Javascript files should be worried about caching.

I looked around for somewhere I could clear the cache, but could find nothing. I eventually googled the subject and found that the clear cache was a sub sub option under the ‘Site Configuration’ menu option.

On another occasion, I had to change some User Permissions. When I clicked on the Save button, my laptop started to grind to the extent that I thought it was going to shut itself down to prevent an explosion.

Perhaps my most stressful experience with Drupal was dealing with this bug. There are 300 posts on the Drupal Forum thread on this bug, and the upshot of it isn’t there isn’t a universal solution. You basically have to figure out what version of a few different modules you are using, and then apply a serious of patches which may or may not break other parts of your installation.

Lets try and use an analogy here.

Building a website with Drupal is like trying to build a house by joining together five or six mobile homes. Its cheap, it doesn’t take long to put together and it seems like a easy solution to a pressing problem.

What you get is something that is about the same size as a house, and that has certain features of house (eg windows and doors), but that also has 5 bathrooms, 5 kitchens, no corridors and no rooms of any useful size. You also need 5 different electricty meters, and in certain cases, if you want to walk from one room to another, you have to leave house and come in through another door.

Also, if you want to make even minor modifications to the look of your house  in future, you have to take the whole thing apart and stick it back together again.

Don’t get me wrong. Open source packages like Drupal are essential part of the Internet, but its becoming clear that the more an application tries to be a solution for everything, the more likely it is to become a solution for nothing.

Preventing robots from posting on a phpBB forum is easy enough if your prospective users are content to wait for an administrator to moderate the registration, but that isn’t going to suit everybody.

Requiring moderation on the part of the administrator is also a pain for the administrator, who has to deal with the registration emails and decide who is real person and who is not.

I came across this problem for http://www.planningmatters.ie/pmbb

When you first become aware of the problem, your impulse reaction is to head off to Google for a tried and tested solution, but the problem is that once a solution gains any currency, the robot authors figure it out and you’re back to square one again.

My first solution was to edit the email that is sent to users awaiting activation, asking them to forward that email back to me to confirm they were a real person. I also set up a cron job to run an SQL script to delete non-activated users from the database, deeming that any user who had not been activated 7 days after initial registration to be a robotic user.

This isn’t ideal in that it requires an extra step for users, but it does mean that real users get through, and that your database is kept in shape.

However, I was still getting floods of email from attempted robotic registrations, so I set about editing the registration script (includes/usercp_register.php).

This script processes registrations based on whether or not the user has agreed to the disclaimer on the primary registration page. I set an extra PHP $_GET variable as part of the disclaimer agreement, and amended the later part of the script to check for that variable before processing the registration. I also set the extra variable equal to date(”DG”) which means that the variable changes every hour. You can see this by examining the discliamer links here:

http://www.planningmatters.ie/pmbb/profile.php?mode=register

The fact that the extra variable is not part of the standard phpBB install will ward off a lot of dumber robots, and the fact that it changes will ward off some smarter ones too. However, there are still a lot of robots out there that are clever enough to detect the verification method, so I was still getting some SPAM registrations.

To clear off the final few robots I knew I was going to have to involve the intellect of real users, in that this is probably the only thing that robots can’t replicate. Hence, I decided to add a really simple, but real, question to the registration page. To do this I edited the following file under the default template:

templates/subSilver/profile_add_body.tpl

I inserted the following extra lines of HTML underneath the Visual Confirmation section:

<tr>
<td class=”row1″><span class=”gen”>What is the day today?</span><br /><span class=”gensmall”>We ask this question to prevent SPAM registrations. SPAM robots won’t know the answer.</span></td>
<td class=”row2″><input type=”text” class=”post” style=”width: 200px” name=”day_today” size=”6″ value=”" /></td>
</tr>

This adds the following question to the registration form:

“What is the day today?”

The answer to which 99.999% of real users on the forum will know.

To check the answer, I then added an extra line to the top of the main registration script:

includes/usercp_register.php

The line I added is:

//ANTI-SPAM DEVICE
if (isset($HTTP_POST_VARS['day_today']) and strtolower($HTTP_POST_VARS['day_today']) != strtolower(date(”l”))) die();

This basically ensures that the answer to the question is the same as the day produced by the date() function (case insensitive) and if its not, the script dies.

Previous to adding this, and even with the other changes, I was getting about 20 robot registrations per day. After adding this, it dropped to about 10 per day, so there was still some work to do.

Finally, Occams Razor came to the rescue. I found out that the robots trawl for the “profile.php” script and the “mode=register” URI, so I set about trying to change these.

They need to be changed in:

includes/page_header.php

includes/usercp_register.php

(remembering of course to rename the file profile.php too)

I changed mine to:

profile.php -> pmatters.php

mode=register -> mode=signupuser

Now, FINALLY, I have stopped getting robotic registrations!!