Setting up Drupal 6 on GoDaddy Servers

I have recently been tasked with setting up a new web site for a client that has all their current web sites and applications housed in GoDaddy servers. I have worked within their environment before and it's always been pretty straightforward, so I had no real worries.

I chose for them, as I had frequently lately, to use Drupal as the core CMS for the project. Drupal core fit their needs well and has tools to allow them to update content quickly and easily, very few additional modules were necessary for anything other than SEO and a theme.

I quickly found out that the installer for Drupal stops cold if it sees register_globals enabled and will not allow installation to continue.

In some PHP environments you can just create a local php.ini file and disable them yourself by adding the text "register_globals = Off" to the file and uploading it to the install directory. This did not work in my case. If you are dead set on installing Drupal, register_globals not withstanding, you will need to manually run the SQL file to install tables, edit the settings.php file for MySQL access, and create the "files" directory inside the site/domain directory, and CHMOD to 0777. From that point on the site will function correctly, but, any time you are in the administration section, you will be alerted that there is a problem with the install. That problem will persist as long as register_globals is enabled.

The security issues are related to cross site scripting attacks. The attackes can be executed on theme .tpl.php files with specifically created links. So it is still in your best interest to find a way to disable these register_globals before going into production with such an install.

Drupal's .htaccess attempts to disable register_globals, but it does not work in every configuration, if php.ini and .htaccess fails, check your host's control panel, or contact your host's support team to have it disabled.

For instructions on disabling register_globals see this post on drupal.org.