I ran into an issue today while setting up a login form on the front page of a site that would post to the login action of the User controller. The issue was that when the the form was posted the App controller beforeFilter was called, the User controller beforeFilter was called, but the login action of the User controller was never reached and a blank template with the normal debugging output was shown. No errors were being output and there wasn't much to go on. Ultimately what ended up being the problem was that in the Home controller where the form was being served from we did not have the following to include the User model:

var $uses = array('User');

Surprisingly within our view we were able to setup forms to work with the User model. When the auth component was checking for the user data in the post it did not find any data, and stopped processing the request. This was not a graceful way for the auth component or CakePHP to handle the request, an error message would have helped track down the issue.


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We've been dealing with an issue on a client's site where customers were reporting that they could not login and when they added items to their cart the cart would come up empty. This information pointed towards a problem with the customer's session being dropped, but we were unable to determine the common line across these customer's environments and came up empty handed. This was a case of being unable to reproduce a problem which made it nearly impossible to fix.

This morning on the Interchange users list there was a post from Racke discussing a similiar issue. His customer had the Ask.com toolbar installed and Interchange's robot matching code was mistakenly matching the Ask.com toolbar as a search spider. The user agent of the browser with Ask.com installed appeared as so:

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; msn OptimizedIE8;ENUS; AskTB5.6)"

A quick look at the current robots.cfg that Steven Graham linked showed that 'AskTB' had been added to the NotRobotUA directive which instructs Interchange to not consider AskTB a search spider, thus allowing proper use of sessions on the site.

Updating the robots.cfg on our client's site allowed users with Ask.com to browse, login and checkout as expected. Those with Interchange sites who see reports of similiar issues should consider a false positive spider match a possibility and update their robots.cfg.


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Tomorrow we'll be having an Interchange community meeting on IRC. All Interchange users and any other interested parties are invited to participate.

Also, just recently, End Point's own David Christensen joined the Interchange Development Group and became a core committer. Congratulations, David, and keep up the good work!

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Today, the June issue of the Open Source Business Review debuts. It features nine women who are active in open source development - as developers, organizers and business leaders.

I wrote about offline community, and how techies in Portland, OR manage to get connected to each other, and how they've encouraged participation from women. You don't often find women at a user group or even a tech-focused meetup at a restaurant or bar. Portland, somehow, has managed to encourage the women in the community to participate and lead. I talk about what I think the factors were that led to the higher percentage of women involved in the community today.

Let me know what you think!

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