Drupal No Fan of Fantastico at bavatuesdays

I just went to the Drupal site to download version 4.7.3 and install it, sans fantastico of course, when I came across this little nugget about Fantastico on Drupal’s homepage which begins to answer questions I had in some eariler posts (read here and here for the backstory):

Fantastico De Luxe: an insecure recipe for disaster
Steven - August 1, 2006 - 00:39

Fantastico De Luxe by Netenberg is an add-on for the popular cPanel web management software, available on many web hosting providers. It promises an easy, turn-key installation of dozens of web applications, including the Drupal CMS.

Unfortunately, while it may appear to fulfill those promises, the only thing Fantastico really gives you is a broken, insecure install that is hard to update. That’s why we strongly advise the Drupal community not to use Fantastico to install and run a production Drupal site.

Don’t just take our word for it however: take a look at the many support threads in our forums discussing problems with Fantastico. Its users have consistent problems with the installation and upgrading of even a simple Drupal site, let alone one which uses one of the many contributed modules available on our site. There are multiple reports of corrupted databases, lost files and broken installations.

I don’t know about you, but this sounds like a riff to me. If these problems prove to “corrupt” more and more open source programs being installed with fantastico, the people who may feel the ramifictions of this fallout the most (outside of Netenberg) are webhosting companies and their clients, for as a tech support person from Bluehost said, “Fantastico is our bread and butter.” And this is true because much of the recent consumer surge for webhosting accounts may be compised of users that may not yet be ready to install their own Drupal site or WordPress blog. Nonetheless, if Netenberg’s Fantastico does not adequately support programs like Drupal and Typo3 for much longer, I am sure their will be some other developers waiting in the wings to take up the challenge.

Interesting development, I guess the folks at bluehost are not who I should have been so blue with after all. I just wish they would have spelled these issues with Netenberg out for their customers a bit more clearly.