Larkspur Boot – New Website Up!
I think I’ve gotten the core of the new application to support the Larkspur Elementary School fundraiser for the 2010 Boot Scootin & Boogie. Erin did most of the information/content of the website using Word 2007, I did the registration pages.
I learned a lot during this implementation. One, that cross-browser compatibility is a royal pain in the ass! My friend Nate suggests using JQuery which is on tap for next time. Also, I discovered Firebug, the wonderful plugin for Firefox that is critical for troubleshooting!
I’m dynamically adding form elements to forms based on the selection the person wants to add to their cart (I only want to ask for information when they select the item that requires additional information). I found that with IE that it doesn’t mind the forms spanning across table rows, but all other browsers had a hard time with the dynamic addition. The solution was to keep the entire form in a cell and use a DIV tag and InnerHTML to dynamically add the form elements.
I had some problems with Coldfusion and IE7 that was solved by using Client.URLToken versus Session.URLToken. For any browser but IE7 the session variable worked just fine. Once switching to the Client variable this worked in IE7 too. This is required because if the browser doesn’t accept cookies then you need to pass session identifiers through the URL query string so the app server can know which session you are in. Otherwise, cookies handles this.
I also had some CSS issues, some of which I haven’t solved yet. The difference between browsers is definitely apparant with styling up your website. Looking for some good clues on shortcuts and standards to use here.
Overall, a good exercise in CSS and Javascript for me to reinforce these concepts that I don’t use all that often. Thanks to St. Google and the smart folks in this world that without knowing it helped me a great deal!
Next up; my Flexi Record database goes online! After a short break though! 
