Drupal 6.x

Certain patterns can be harmful or dangerous for your site.

Aliases that begin at the root

If you have an alias such as [title-raw] for a piece of content that users can create you allow them to create pages like "http://www.example.com/google1234567.html" that are used to authenticate Google or Yahoo! webmaster tools. This then allows the user to authenticate as the owner of the site and control the entries inside those tools (including removing your site from the index, changing between www and no-www versions of your site, telling the search bot to visit less frequently). This is not the default and is not recommended. If you want short aliases at a minimum make your pattern something like "c/[title-raw]" to put a character "c" before every title.

Index Aliases

For example, certain situations where you create a pattern like forum/[title] and you have "Create Index Aliases" turned on pathauto will then create a page at example.com/forum/ which over-rides the default example.com/forum page. In order to fix this problem you can clear out that entry from the url aliases either via the GUI at example.com/admin/path or via the database table. A better path to create would be forums/ or discussions/ so that the names don't collide.

Transliteration Problems

To manage date formats in Drupal 7, you need to manage both format types and formats themselves in the Regional and Language settings.

Drupal ships with a sitewide contact form since version 4.7 that you can use to allow site visitors to send feedback. As mentioned in the help text on the contact form settings page, you can also use the body area just above the form to give site visitors your postal address or share any other information.

However, because you can't specify an input format for the contact form page, the additional information you add will display without linebreaks or paragraph breaks and look pretty ugly.

VotingAPI is a flexible, easy-to-use framework for rating, voting, moderation, and consensus-gathering modules in Drupal. It allows module developers to focus on their ideas (say, providing a 'rate this thread' widget at the bottom of each forum post) without worrying about the grunt work of storing votes, preventing ballot-stuffing, calculating the results, and so on.

VotingAPI does four key jobs for module developers:

1. CRUD: Create/Retrieve/Update/Delete operations for voting data. The simplest modules only need to call two functions -- votingapi_set_votes() and votingapi_select_results() -- to use the API. Others can use finer-grain functions for complete control.
2. Calculation: Every time a user casts a vote, VotingAPI calculates the results and caches them for you. You can use the default calculations (like average, total, etc) or implement your own custom tallying functions.
3. Workflow: By integrating with Actions.module, VotingAPI can trigger workflow steps (like promoting a node to the front page, hiding a comment that's been flagged as spam, or emailing an administrator) when votes are cast and results are tallied. Modules can expose their own 'default' action sets and filter criteria to provide moderation and promotion systems.