On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 7:23 AM, riccardo <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 07, 2010 at 07:56:52PM -0800, jacmgr wrote:
>
>>                           .  I don't have any opinion on .txt; any
>> extension you choose would be fine and I can set windows to open that
>> extension in my text editor.  I guess I would prefer an extension of
>> some type just becuase I am used to using them.
>
> I am strongly opposed to a spurious extension.  But if users on the dark
> side need a file extension, surely it would be trivial to make it a
> configuration item?  In any case, from what I have seen, modern doze
> installations hide the extensions by default, and that behaviour could also
> be copied. But I still think it would be wrong to impose an extension.

I'm not keen on adding the .txt extension, for aesthetic reasons, and
we could make it configurable easy enough (which is a good idea). Yet
the use of an extension does make it easier to open files, and/or for
me, to do extended find and replaces using my particular text editor
(only scans associated file types).

But the big reason for this is security. Suppose you have a test group
where members can create and edit pages. Someone creates a page called
test.php and copies some php code in. This is not a problem for
BoltWire, but suppose someone tried to call that page directly?
http://www.site.com/field/pages/test.php?  Yes, the .htaccess is
supposed to block that, but what if it gets corrupted somehow? You
have a pretty big security vulnerability. Adding an invisible .txt
extension might keep this from happening.

We are safe currently because < is escaped. If we remove that, we are
still theoretically safe (because of the .htaccess). But practically,
the key to security is multiple layers. There are always unforeseen
holes. The trick is to make sure that when the bad guys penetrate one
layers there's always another blocking them. This is why the character
encoding and page name extension are connected.

Also, I should note this would be completely invisible to the user.
Everything would appear exactly it is now--unless you were looking in
the page folder directly. We are just talking about a slight change to
the under-the-hood way pages are saved/retrieved. Making this a
configurable option, turned off by default is a good idea actually--as
it solves the problem of downward compatibility a bit. Though a helper
script that renames all the pages is easy enough to do.  I'm still in
discussion mode on this point. Thanks for the feedback.

Cheers,
Dan
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