What I'm dealing with is what could be best described as a botched CMS install. I can't think of any other way to say it. We've basically got a nightmare, but we are stuck with it for awhile (and management is starting to freak a bit). Not only are things disorganized, but we also have random errors that pop up.
Here are three biggest things that pop up for us:
1.) Nodes randomly unpublishing - We aren't entirely sure what causes this. At least once or twice a week we get an e-mail about a page no longer showing up, only to find it has just become unpublished. Our only guess is that the Autosave Module might be responsible.
2.) Nodes overwriting other nodes - We have one recent example of this where the front page of a major section of the site has disappeared. It was overwritten by another page of a completely different content type. We were able to tell this happened, and it wasn't just someone copy/pasting into the wrong window, due to meta tags and clean URLs disappearing as well. No clue as to possible cause.
3.) Anonymous visitors can edit pages - This plus we've gone through all the different access areas we could find and they are still able to edit. Part of this is that some old users were removed earlier in the year and all pages attributed to them were set to anonymous. Some of these pages are setting themselves to anonymous it seems as well. First thought was Workflow, but could not find any evidence in it.
Here are the technical details: Drupal 5.7
Modules:
Admin Menu 5.x-1.1
CCK 5.x-1.6
Filefield 5.x-1.x-dev
Image (ImageField) 5.x-1.v-dev
Date 5.x-1.0-beta
Boost 5.x-1.x-dev
Block Cache 5.x-1.x-dev
Image 5.x-1.x-dev
Gmap 5.x-1.x-dev
Mime Mail 5.x-1.x-dev
Notify 5.x-1.1
Send 5.x-1.x-dev
SMTP 5.x-1.x-dev
Actions 5.x-1.x-dev
Autosave 5.x-1.2
Biblio 5.x-1.x-dev
Forms 5.x-1.x-dev
Google Maps Node Enabler 1.0
Google News sitemap 5.x-1.2
HTTP Redirect 1.1
Printer-friendly pages 5.x-1.2
Survey 5.x-1.x-dev
JQuery Update 5.x-1.0
Views 5.x-1.6
Workflow 5.x-1.2
Sitemap 5.x-1.7
We also have a few custom modules that were made when the site was completed. These don't add much functionality, JS image rotator, but I still have not had the chance to go through them all. Looking for anything that may change anonymous editing access is a priority.
I've only been dealing with this site for about 1.5 - 2 months and with the day to day operations, it has been slow going towards forming an upgrade plan. We know that the best thing to do is to scrap it and start from a fresh 6.x install and move things over. Not only are things in disrepair but as far as I have seen there is no documentation left over from those who were here before me.
It is a really crappy situation to be in, but for the time being I am stuck with it. We have been able put together a server for testing, but are very very far from a stable upgrade path we could use (at least in terms of up-to-date on a 5.x install).
Most of my experience is in the 6.x realm and I do not have near as much knowledge about the development of 5.x modules.
I have searched but found few answers thus far. I'm hoping some of you might be able to help. I'm hoping one or two of you might read this and remember "hey I had that exact problem, look over here" or a "that sounds familiar, check out this old post". Anyone that might be able to point me in some sort of direct would be appreciated.
Comments
Blame the custom modules
Turn off the custom modules or move them out of the path for a while. See if the problems go away.
I bet $10 that your anonymous editing power comes from accidentally including $user->uid = 1 instead of, say ($user->uid == 1) as a permissions test.
I did that. It made me sad.
:)
Well looked into that
Went through and looked at all of your custom modules. Unfortunately it doesn't look like that is the culprit. Most of the modules only appear to add form fields.