Posted by Christopher on January 22, 2010 at 2:08am
I'm a novice at understanding technical drupal website tasks and I'm just starting a testing phase of a drupal website that I understand has some rather unique coding. I feel I must apologize if my questions seem as if something that is easily researched.
I'm hoping someone can explain to me issues concerning hiding different source codes, such as css, from website members views to avoid people taking and copying the website.
Thank you,
Chris Taudvin
Comments
You can't hide it
Browsers need to be able to download CSS (and JS and HTML) to use it. Once it's on someone's computer, it's out of your control. Turning on compression will make it harder to understand, but it's still there.
You should focus on making your websites something more than the things that can be easily copied, e.g. service or people.
Thanks
Your reply is helpful, as you can imagine, it's sorta daunting figuring out that I'll actually have to learn how to manage the website and further developments. It's also comforting to gain clarity on the issue.
Some content can be protected
While you can't hide some things like css and JavaScript, the bulk of what makes a site valuable, including custom Drupal modules and the contents of your database are naturally hidden. That's because only the derived content gets sent to the web browser--the behind-the-scenes code that pulls together that content is not sent out to the web browser.
Ah good,
that's helpful too. Part of the issue is not knowing the norms and peramitors of website managment etiquite. I've recently realized that it will probably be useful to delve into understanding how drupal works in consideration of beta developments and de-bugging for now. I'm approaching testing a website and putting it on line and when I started I could explain my understanding of website development, in hindsight, that I might have thought it as easy as dragging and dropping blocks onto pages. In consideration of having a sense of humor about things.
The website is; www.beta.letssavetheworldtogether.org, of which I don't know if there is any uniqueness to the coding and such things, I just haven't seen it anywhere else yet.
I wouldn't worry too much
I wouldn't worry too much about code like css or custom modules getting stolen. Yeah you spend money on them and they are valuable to you but people are a more likely to steal your content and graphics then your css layout.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of nice css layouts for a thief to choose from the odds of them taking yours is small. A lot of the time thieves will steal your content when you start ranking high in google.
The subject of website security is extensive and there are many methods and tricks to Try to protect your stuff but basically I wouldn't worry too much about css or custom modules getting stolen unless you are creating very expensive stuff in a very competitive market.
Thanks
Thanks for the reassurance. I'm someone with an idea and very little business and website experience. When I started looking for someone to build the website about 3.5 years ago I had hardly sent 30 emails at the time. So, at this point I've let go of the issue which had occurred to me once the beta website was on line.
I'm anticipating that it's going to be interesting for me to learn as I find out whether or not my willingness to move forward with the idea as I have becomes successful with my build it and they will come approach.
Really, nothing I had anticipated I'd involve myself in and a fairly spontaneous decision and a story that I'm not sure how to tell yet as the story is what is most interesting to me and involving my mind with things that feel like corporate spirituality feels like involving myself with affluent belligerence as if the change that so many have mentioned has something to do with being part of it.
For example, one of the things I wonder about at this point is, how do I get people to do the business and technical side of things and follow through with what felt like an epiphany while in complete acknowledgement of a grandiosity that I have difficulty identifying with?
What I really want to know is, is there even any reasonableness associated with hoping to find some free support from people who know how to develop the website successfully without a struggle on my part as it feels that I can best approach a possibility of success by being silly about it? In some cases anyway as it at least feels fun, at times, proceeding in silly way that is.