The Developers Zone is a place I have decided to open up to the development community to basically share my knowledge of development and some theories I have pieced together to help other programmers build new and interesting applications.
What I am going to cover in the Developers Zone will be very much like what you wished you had time and resources to invest into development of. In this case, I have taken the hit financially and intellectually to invest some development time and resources into these prototypes.
In other areas of the Developers Zone, you will see frameworks for building objects such as Joomla Components, and also a breakdown on how plugins work. Basically, I am going to be doing brain dumps into this area to share my knowledge and expertise on the subject.
Amazon Web Services
Whilist working through the jwTube Project (soon to be released to the Subscribers) I came across an interesting issue while using JWPlayer and Authenticated URLs via the Amazon S3 system.
It seems a signed URL with a + in the signature data was causing JWPlayer to stop loading the remote FLV from the S3 Service. I proved the cause of the + symbol by reloading and watching for keys without +'s and observing their behaviours.
Sure enough, signatures without the + were working, and those with them were bombing out.
And to make things worse, it seemed no matter what I did with escaping URLs and string replacing them the issue would not give up.
So I can up with this very easy solution which works 100% of the time, and could possibly rectify a lot of issues with other Flash FLV players too!
Joomla 1.5
Undoubtedly you are aware of the ability for Joomla to publish modules on specific menu items (or more specifically, chosen itemIds). What I am about to show you is how to replicate this using three lines of code which you can quite easily glean from the Joomla Core files.
Personally, I opted to share this with everyone since it is a piece of code that has eluded me for sometime.
Read more: Implementing the Menu Context code into your components
Joomla 1.5
There is a bit more to this step-by-step if you are intending to have these fields editable from within the /administrator console.
If you have taken a look through Part 1 of this tutorial, then you should be safe to proceed. However if you haven't, you will need to familiarise yourself with it, because I am going to refer to past information in this tutorial.
Read more: Adding fields to Joomla registration page (continued)
Joomla 1.5
One of the many things people use such components like Community Builder for is the addition of fields on the Register page. Unfortunately, some of these components can have an adverse effect later on, and can actually cause a security issue in your installation (and don't forget looking for another patch if an exploit is detected).
This has prompted me to write up a little mini step-by-step to help you through the modifying of the registration pages.