I just started working on a new website project for a friend of mine – Josh Froerer. He is dentist with a practice located in Burlingame, CA. Dr. Froerer and Dr. Hallsted approached me to build a simple and elegant website to help attract patients to their growing business. After some discussion, I decided to build the site using Drupal CMS. Drupal allows for a huge amount of extensibility and will help to easily grow the website to accommodate the growing needs of the business.

I did run into a major issue when trying to install Drupal on his ISP though….he is using IXWebHosting. When running though the install I get the following error message…

“register_globals is enabled. Drupal requires this configuration directive to be disabled. Your site may not be secure when register_globals is enabled.”

After a bunch of research and no real solution, it looks like IXWebHosting has register_globals = On by default. Some of the solutions I read online say to put a custom php.ini file with the line register_globals = Off in the root folder. Sorry, but that didn’t work for me. Actually, I put that php.ini file everywhere and nothing worked. Having register_globals=On is major security risk, so I am not sure why IXWebHosting has it on by default!

So, now I am just hosting the Drupal site on my server…using HostMonster. No problem at all installing and running the installation on my server. Unfortunately, I will never get back those 5 hours of troubleshooting IXWebHosting. Thanks!

I am just getting started on this project but will provide progress as I move along.