Manual editing of access control files can be dangerous and even destructive. This feature should only be used by those familiar with editing UNIX configuration files. Misconfiguration of these files can result in inoperability of entire websites.
There are several caveats to keep in mind when manually editing Weblock's access control files:
- Weblock reserves certain directives for itself. Changes to these will be ignored and overwritten by Weblock:
- AuthType
- AuthName
- AuthUserFile
- AuthGroupFile
- Order
- No apache directive can occur twice in an access control file, even if one is commented out, due to how Weblock stores access control settings
- Any double-commented line (##) will be deleted by Weblock
- apache directives that Weblock does not utilize are moved to the end of the file. Their order is preserved, but blank lines among them are not
Other than these four rules, manually editing access control files in Weblock is identical to editing the .htaccess files in a normal text editor. See apache's documentation for more information on this.