Made to Order Software Corporation

MO Auto add terms for Drupal

Alexis Wilke — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 05:03:32 +0000

MO Auto add terms is a PHP module for Drupal 6.x.

It is particularly useful for maintaining small and large taxonomies with a small or large number of nodes. Especially taxonomies used as site indexes or glossaries.

This module automatically handles the addition (and optionally removal) of taxonomy terms to a node. It does it at the time the node is saved and when the background process runs (i.e. CRON.)

CSS3 media queries

Alexis Wilke — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 05:26:21 +0000

CSS is improving with the introduction of CSS3.

Contrary to the previous version, CSS3 supports selections that are very advanced, offering capabilities close to what you could write in JavaScript.

Today I wanted to talk about the Media Queries because that can be used to very much optimize the list of links used to load your CSS data.

In HTML, you can use a <link ...> to add a CSS file to your page.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" />

In this case, the file style.css will always be loaded, whatever the media being used.

South Sudan top-level domain is .ss

Alexis Wilke — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 18:20:21 +0000

Very recently, Sudan was split in the northern and southern part. The southern part has a new name: South Sudan. It is now official and the new ISO country code given to this new country is SS.

This means their country top-level domain name will be .ss.

Assuming they open their domain name to all world wide, this is going to be quite interesting! There are many words in the English language that end with .ss such as dre.ss, and stre.ss, and le.ss...

If you're in the domain name business, look out for those! If it works like other top-level domains, these will go really quick and make the

Security Issue in many mail systems

Alexis Wilke — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 20:04:42 +0000

It always amazes me when one finds a security issue that looks like something that should never have happened in the first place.

This one was found earlier this year by Wietse Venema who first discovered the issue in Postfix.

He fixed the Postfix server quickly, however, he went further. He actually tested many other servers sending commands that bypass that very security measure and to his surprised he found out that Postfix wasn't the only system affected by the problem.

For those interested, all the details of the problem can be found on the Postfix website as CVE-2011-411.

Upgrade to PHP 5.3.3 or older because of security issue

Alexis Wilke — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:26:19 +0000

If you are responsible for a Debian or Ubuntu server and run PHP on it, make sure to run the following command to fix several security issues found in PHP:

sudo apt-get install php5-suhosin

This will make the necessary and your PHP version (security wise) will look like you have PHP 5.3.3.

What I found quite annoying in regard to this issue is the fact that it was very difficult to find a mention of this upgrade. All I could find in large number were people saying that you'd have to get an upgrade using the source code of PHP. Somehow, I did not feel like upgrading PHP from source!

IPv4 exhausted!

Alexis Wilke — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 23:11:22 +0000

That's it! It's official, the IPv4 address space is now exhausted. This happened this year on February 3, 2011. Now what?

Well, first of all the exhaustion was at the level of the IANA, not for each single Internet provider. This means many more IPs are still available.

However, it is important now for everyone to think of writing any new Internet based software so that it works with IPv61

1. Remember that if you support IPv6, then your system is capable of accessing all IPv4 addresses since the IPv6 address range includes the IPv4. Now let's hope that the IPv6 is not going to be exhausted in

Google Panda Change Beneficial to Press Releases

Alexis Wilke — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 18:15:46 +0000

Today, BusinessWire disclosed the fact that they and their customers were benefiting from the changes made by Google to improve the giant search engine results.

The news is not that surprising since the Panda change was to eliminate most of the so called farmer websites. Websites that would copy news, most often as is, and not themselves create any additional value (Except to the owner by having advertising and other products and services for sale on their otherwise fairly useless website.)

Of course, many people are not happy as this change affected 11.8% of the US websites. Yet, users will

MO Label Inside for Drupal

Alexis Wilke — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 05:22:50 +0000

$14.90

More and more, modern websites move the label attached to a text field input directly inside the text field. Especially, you see this feature when you are asked to enter an email address or a query string in a search box.

The MO Label Inside module offers this functionality for all of your Drupal text field input elements.

$14.90

Put the label of an HTML Input inside the Input element

Alexis Wilke — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 21:06:19 +0000

Today I was looking into creating a small module for Drupal that would allow me to move the labels of my HTML Input elements inside the element itself. This is useful for small forms such as the Search, Log In, and Newsletter Subscription forms. Bigger forms are better left alone (I think.)

First, it took me some time to find the right keywords to search with. Once I included Label Inside Input Element, I started to get good answers.

Before it was done by setting some default value in the Input element. There are two drawbacks with that method: one you need to test and remove that default

How to bypass Drupal strong security?

Alexis Wilke — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:45:31 +0000

Interestingly enough, today I received a Security Advisory from Drupal saying that users received an email from a hacker asking them to install a Trojan module on their Drupal system.

I find it quite interesting since, if Drupal wasn't secure, the hackers would not have to ask you to make it unsecure, would they?

However, this shows how many CMS systems introduce a security issue problem to your web server installation since it is required to let your web server execute any one PHP file...

All the files installed on your web server and that are directly accessible from the outside (i.e. ...