Persistent Menu or Items?

New Member Joined: Aug 21, 2006 Posts: 6

I am working on a theme for my ravennuke site and have come across something I have never had to play with before. I have a lot of customized blocks that show/hide and also divs that can be positioned around the screen. Now I need to find away to make them persistent for the user as they go thru my site. I know this would probably be done with cookies but my question is if i have 20 items that need to be set would that mean 20 different cookies? Thats what Im getting from the tutorials I been reading. Maybe Im just misunderstanding them. I have limited coding experience. If there is a better way or a best way to handle this could some one please point me in the right direction. The functions are in javascript so thats why this post is in the javascript forum.

Thank you for your time.
Devilchi

Posted: Wed Jan 28, 2009 3:42 am

Nah, you can put as much data as you want in a cookie. Mostly it just stores strings.
You could concatenate all your block states as a set of block switches, 1s and 0s. Or do something more complicated if you have a dynamic number of blocks
"block1"=>1,"block2"=>0, etc

Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 6:30 am

evaders99, I thought that there was a limit imposed based upon the request headers, which is where I believe the cookie data is passed back-and-forth in??? I just can't remember what that size limit is.

Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 9:33 am

Could you develop a MYSQL table that is modeled on the current blocks table but contains your on off switches (like Evaders suggested)? Then write a little modification to mainfile to have it read in that table and present the data. There are several functions in mainfile that work together to show blocks ... you might need to hack into those too.

Not clear from your post whether the blocks vary by user. If so you might need to stuff the uid into the table too.

Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 9:55 am

Thanks alot guys. Im going to dig deeper into this and maybe come up with some sort of hack so i can let every registered used position things how they want and only let guests move things around during there session time. I also need to figure out if this is really something my users will use or just something "I" think would be cool myself. Sometimes those two blend into a fog lol. Thanks again

Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 11:05 pm

I was curious about montego question...
so 4KB seems to be the standard for one cookie data, more than enough to handle any data you should be passing via cookies. Incidentally, there's a limit of the number of cookies, 20 per site. So even more reason to compact your data into one cookie
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