Hi, Since there is a significant interest in the Hungarian Drupal user crowd to use Drupal on several of the free hosting accounts provided in our country, and there were quite a few problems before, I decided to look into installing Drupal on the two major free hosting services (ultraweb.hu and freeweb.hu). Here are my observations on supporting free hosting providers (it was not straightforward, nor easy for a beginner). 1. Everything is under the webroot. You can put nothing out of the webroot folder. This makes you lose the private files feature, and forces you to set up an upload temp folder under the webroot. Fortunately Drupal tries to suggest a folder under the files folder, so the temp folder is also (supposed to be) protected from malicios PHP files, if .htaccess would be supported. => Nothing to do here, just a fact. 2. Htaccess files are not allowed. At least you are prevented from uploading them via FTP. You can create them with PHP (the .htaccess in the files folder is created), but then the contents does not matter. I bet they have AllowOverride None set. => Implication: Clean URLs are unusable, PHP settings are not set as ideally expected by Drupal. Fortunately Drupal is capable to work even in these harsh conditions, given the code to programatically turn off magic_quotes for example. But there are security problems, since the .module, .theme, .install, etc files are not protected. Only phptemplate theme files are protected because of their free hosting friendly .tpl.php extension usage. Action point: maybe we should revisit using .module.php, .theme.php, .install.php etc file extensions Action point: look around what is affected if the expected PHP settings are not there 3. Some of the PHP functions are disabled, so the screen is full of errors, instead of Drupal working right. The affected functions on the two hosts are: - ini_set (in settings.php) => nothing set with this is effective (even where this is enabled, the settings are set with php_admin_value in Apache, so we cannot override several settings) - mkdir(), chmod() (in the files and temp folder setup) => cannot create the folder and/or chmod() them to the right permission - realpath() (used in files related code) Action point: wrap the ini_set() call into a disabled_functions check Action point: replace realpath() with drupal_realpath() and use a less secure but at least somewhat working alternative if realpath() is not available (see http://php.net/realpath user notes) Action point: think about making the mkdir and chmod calls conditional too Action point: provide a compatibility summary page, where the existing GD, clean URL and other stuff is moved to, plus PHP settings and other stuff is checked for and displayed => one knows how secure or capable his system is by visiting this page (Q: how is this affected by the install system?) 4. Because of some restrictions on the runtime of PHP scripts, it is not surely possible to import the Hungarian translation in complete. Some of our users manually split the po file into six or more chunks (with po headers added to all chunks), and import these one-by-one manually. This is ehm, quite lame to suggest... What seems to be a solution is to get back to SQL imports for languages, at least for supporting these restricted hosts. This has other advantages of setting up language specific parameters (while we are waiting for an installation profile system :). Action point: investigate providing translations as SQL dumps additionaly to PO files By the way our free hosting services are not employing any of the CPanel, Plesk or other web admin software. They all developed their own home-grown solutions, so the limitations, setup screens are all different (and sometimes quite confusing even for experienced people like me). Mail sending has its different tricks on different hosts, some have nice daily cron support, some have no cron support. All use phpmyadmin though, so this is the common starting point. I would suggested we first discuss these action points, and then find people to implement those desired. Gabor