Drupal 6

Back in May, we announced that we'd be working on getting Drupal 6 core, and the contrib modules used by our D6LTS customers, working on PHP 7.2 before the end of the year.

This is largely because PHP 5 will be reaching it's End of Life (EOL) on December 31st, and will no longer be supported by the PHP maintainers, which means no more security updates.

How can we help keep your Drupal 6 site secure, if PHP itself is insecure?

Well, that deadline is coming up fast, and in fact, may be coming sooner than December for folks hosted with certain hosting companies!

Acquia just announced that they'll automatically switch all sites hosted on Acquia Cloud to PHP 7.1 on October 1st, less than a month away from now.

Inspired by this (read: some of our customers are hosted on Acquia ;-)) we're going to make a push to get a handful of brave D6LTS customers switched to PHP 7.1 or 7.2 by the end of September.

After proving this out with a handful of sites in September, we'll continue to roll that out to the rest of our customers in October, November and December.

Interested in getting involved? Wondering how much of this will be shared with the community?

Read the rest of the article!

Today, there is a Critical security release for Drupal core to fix multiple vulnerabilities. You can learn more in the security advisory:

Drupal core - Critical - Multiple Vulnerabilities - SA-CORE-2018-001

What makes this release special, is that some of these issues also affect Drupal 6! So, we're also making a Drupal 6 Long-Term Support (D6LTS) release of Drupal core.

Drupal 6 core security update

As you may know, Drupal 6 has reached End-of-Life (EOL) which means the Drupal Security Team is no longer doing Security Advisories or working on security patches for Drupal 6 core or contrib modules - but the Drupal 6 LTS vendors are and we're one of them!

The following vulnerabilities mentioned in the security advisory affect Drupal 6:

• JavaScript cross-site scripting prevention is incomplete - Critical

• jQuery vulnerability with untrusted domains - Moderately Critical

• External link injection on 404 pages when linking to the current page - Less Critical

Here you can download the Drupal 6 patch to fix, or a full release ZIP or TAR.GZ.

If you have a Drupal 6 site, we recommend you update immediately! We have already deployed the patch for all of our Drupal 6 Long-Term Support clients. :-)

If you'd like all your Drupal 6 modules to receive security updates and have the fixes deployed the same day they're released, please check out our D6LTS plans.

Note: if you use the myDropWizard module (totally free!), you'll be alerted to these and any future security updates, and will be able to use drush to install them (even though they won't necessarily have a release on Drupal.org).

Today, there was a Highly Critical security advisory for a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability in the me aliases module for Drupal 7:

me aliases - Highly critical - Arbitrary code execution - SA-CONTRIB-2017-097

This module provides shortcut paths to current user's pages, eg user/me, blog/me, user/me/edit, tracker/me etc.

It was incorrectly handling URL arguments that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary PHP code.

However, the way the Drupal 6 version of the module handles URL arguments isn't vulnerable in the same way. So, Drupal 6 users can rest easy - your site isn't affected by this issue.

But if you do use it on Drupal 7, given the criticality of this issue, please update right away!

If you'd like all your Drupal 6 modules to receive security updates and have the fixes deployed the same day they're released, please check out our D6LTS plans.

Note: if you use the myDropWizard module (totally free!), you'll be alerted to these and any future security updates, and will be able to use drush to install them (even though they won't necessarily have a release on Drupal.org).

Today, there was a Moderately Critical security advisory for an Access Bypass vulnerability in the netFORUM Authentication module for Drupal 7:

netFORUM Authentication - Moderately critical - Access Bypass - SA-CONTRIB-2017-077

The module was bypassing protections on the Drupal 7 user login form, to deter brute force attempts to login to the site, and so was an Access Bypass vulnerability by making login less secure when using this module.

However, Drupal 6 (including Pressflow 6) don't have these same protections for the user login form, and so, using this module is no less secure than using vanilla Drupal 6. Of course, these protections could be added to this module, and while this would be great security hardening, this doesn't represent a vulnerability - only a weakness which is also present (and widely known) in Drupal 6 core.

If you'd like all your Drupal 6 modules to receive security updates and have the fixes deployed the same day they're released, please check out our D6LTS plans.

Note: if you use the myDropWizard module (totally free!), you'll be alerted to these and any future security updates, and will be able to use drush to install them (even though they won't necessarily have a release on Drupal.org).

Today, there were two security advisories posted for modules that have Drupal 6 versions:

• CAPTCHA - Moderately Critical - Denial of Service - SA-CONTRIB-2017-073

• Clientside Validation - Critical - Arbitary PHP Execution - DRUPAL-SA-CONTRIB-2017-072

Happily, neither issue affects the Drupal 6 version of the modules!

I think this is particularly important for the Critical issue in Clientside Validation. Anyone who uses the Drupal 7 version of that module should update immediately! But, this time, Drupal 6 users can rest easy. :-)

If you'd like all your Drupal 6 modules to receive security updates and have the fixes deployed the same day they're released, please check out our D6LTS plans.

Note: if you use the myDropWizard module (totally free!), you'll be alerted to these and any future security updates, and will be able to use drush to install them (even though they won't necessarily have a release on Drupal.org).

Today, there were Critical security releases for Drupal 7 & 8:

https://www.drupal.org/SA-CORE-2017-003

We received a couple e-mails asking if it affected Drupal 6, so I decided to post this short article to say:

Happily, Drupal 6 is not affected! :-)

Of the 3 vulnerabilities in that SA, the two Drupal 8 ones don't apply to Drupal 6: it doesn't have REST or YAML support.

We did extensive testing to see if the Drupal 7 one applied to Drupal 6, including, testing the 'upload' module (in Drupal 6 core) and with the contrib 'filefield' and 'webform' modules and couldn't reproduce the vulnerability.

(FYI, since we have access to the private Drupal security queue, we did our testing several months ago :-))

So, if you still use Drupal 6, you don't need to worry about a core update today!

As part of our series discussing the use of Drupal in non-profits (click here to subscribe via e-mail), we recently reached out to one of our favorite clients, WIEGO, who candidly shared some of their struggles and successes.

Since re-launching their site on Drupal almost 6 years ago, they've grown from a site with 50 static pages, to a searchable, categorized repository of news and knowledge spanning over 22,000 articles!

In this case study, we gain some insights into how organizations like WIEGO decided on Drupal, have lived with some of the growing-pains, and are planning to move forward into the future!

Read more to find out!

You run a Drupal Agency - or you're an independent Drupal Developer. Your customers need support. You try to do support. You try to get back to project work. You try to do support. You try to get back to project work. You get the idea. Ad nauseum. That's your life.

What if there were a better way? What if you could spend time doing more profitable things - and spend your spare time like the attached image: on the beach?

We've been there, and we've come up with a handful of key reasons why we feel you should consider outsourcing your Drupal Support and Maintenenance.

Read more to find out!

A few weeks ago, we had A Survey! Is Drupal Hard?

First of all, thank you for taking the time to answer (even though we had a short-lived technical snafu!). At myDropWizard, we believe in transparency and openness, so I'm going to share the unfiltered data with you - as well as what my thoughts are in interpreting this non-scientific study.