breaking Lend Page changes

[Chris Means]

Hi,

One or more changes that have been made recently on the Lend page implementation are causing some issues.

1)  The Sort drop-down list no longer displays correctly under FireFox v3.5.5 (it's now on the left side of the page, and overlaps the Status drop-down list (see attached screen shot).

2)  Now, when some one selects a different sort option on the Lend page, the URL page reference changes from:

http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses

to:

http://www.kiva.org/?page=businesses...

Dropping the app.php page name reference...which is breaking my FireFox add-on the KivaMFIChecker.

Now maybe #2 is just bad programming on my part, and I can change my code, but, I don't want to go changing something that might be fixed (returned to the original/previous implementation).

Thanks.

-Chris

[Dude #2.5]

The issues are all fixed now.

Thanks.

-Chris

>  kiva-lend-overlap.PNG
> 443KViewDownload

[Chris Means]

Hi,

The URL for the Lend page has changed again, breaking the Kiva MFI Checker Firefox Extension.

The URL was:

http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses

But is now:

http://www.kiva.org/lend

The last time a change like this occurred (see messages below), you changed it back.  Is this a permanent change this time, or will you be changing it back?

Thanks.

-Chris

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[Noah Balmer]

Hi Chris,
We've recently changed the way our URLs are built to make them easier to read and work with.  The old URLs are now 301 redirects to the new URLs, with a couple tracking parameters tacked on.  Browsers, and anything else that fully supports HTTP, should follow the redirects seamlessly, but if you have code that's always expecting a 200 it might have trouble.

We aren't planning any more changes to this any time soon, so the http://www.kiva.org/lend URL is preferred now.  Because of the 301's we didn't actually anticipate this change breaking anyone else's code, so we didn't make any announcements ahead of the change. I hope it's not too much of a hassle to fix.

If we make any similar changes in the future, I'll try to get the word out to the developer community beforehand.

Noah Balmer
Software Engineer
Kiva.org

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[Chris Means]

Thanks Noah.

My code works by seeing what URL the user's page is "on", and if it's what I know as the Lend page, that's when it does it's work.  So changing the URL does break my code.

It's an easy enough code change, but does require users to get the updated extension.

An early warning for this sort of thing (including changes to page layouts etc.) would be very helpful.

Thanks.

-Chris