Intern working for Indian NGO - Help with PHP 4, advising staff
- by Kevin Burke
Hello,
For the past three months I've been working for an Indian NGO (http://sevamandir.org), doing some volunteer work in the field but also trying to improve their website, which needs a ton of work. Recently I've been trying to fix the "subscribe to newsletter" button, which is broken. I used filter_var to filter the email input, but when I tried to test this out I got an error. Then I learned that the web host is still using php version 4.3.2 and register_globals is turned on.
I've mentioned that they should upgrade their web host before (they are paying around $50 per year for Rediff Web Hosting, complete with 100MB storage and 1 MySQL database). That would add a lot of complexity for the IT staff of 3, who would have to update everyone's email information (I assume? this is a 250-person organization), and have me find a new web host and teach them about it. The staff isn't that sophisticated about web usage - the head guy still uses IE6, and the website's laid out in tables (they use Dreamweaver WYSIWYG to lay out pages).
So I've got two options - use regular expressions to filter the email, which I'm not that skilled at doing (and would be more vulnerable to exploitation after I leave), turn off register globals and then try to teach the staff what I'm doing, or try to get them to upgrade their versions of PHP and MySQL and/or change web host. I'd appreciate some advice.
Thanks for your help,
Kevin
