Stumbled upon this. If you’re going to make a URI (domain or sub domain) with an underscore, think twice. IE7 and IE8 do not support these URI’s when dealing with cookies.

For more details, see this blog post, detailing the symptoms.

http://blog.patrick-morgan.net/2008/09/problems-with-ie7-sessions-not-saved-in.html

A few sites that we have been working on wanted an extra step with the signup process on their website that requires an additional level of vetting by the site administrator when a new user submits the online form. To achieve this we made some minor changes to the core code.

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Developing in Joomla sometimes throws up minor issues with solutions so simple that you wonder why they’re not in the core code.  While putting together the Rangitikei District Council’s website we discovered that there’s no easy way to set up Navigation Access Keys in Joomla 1.5, as per the New Zealand Government Web Standards (http://webstandards.govt.nz/8-4-navigation-access-keys/).  The keys are a great navigation aid to non-mouse users and are recommended by w3c (http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/#keyboard-operation).
To add Access Keys to a Joomla site you need to hack at the core code of your Joomla install.  There are some basic instructions on the Joomla documentation site at http://docs.joomla.org/Adding_Access_Keys.  This sets up a new “Accessibility Access Key” field in the System Parameters dropdown that’s available when you edit an menu item, allowing you to simply enter the keystroke you want to associate with that menu link on your site.

The hack makes it easy to add as many access keys as you need, and you can offer more than just the basic keystroke options set on most government websites.

When I started on a new Ruby on Rails project at Katipo Communications, I evaluated a range of testing libraries, and decided on Cucumber. It’s simple and has a flexible style of feature testing. For more info about it, see the Cucumber Wiki Documentation. In this post, I’ll detail some of my experiences with it for other developers who are considering using it.

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