When I say vanishing dollar signs I'm not implying that the Xaraya team are extremely poor and getting poorer; what I mean to say is that for about two weeks I've been struggling with a Xaraya site that refused to display a monetary value denoted by a dollar sign, for example $5.50 would not show up in its complete form, but instead as .50

This was extremely frustrating for my client who was trying to put up some prices for her different menus, an essential part of her cafe business. It also made me look bad as I couldn't seem to identify the problem. I posted the issue on the Xaraya mailing list and Jason Judge came to my rescue with a variety of possible places to start looking in. After an evening of confusion I woke up this morning and decided to look in the database and noticed the missing dollar signs and digits were still there so it was obviously a display issue or an issue reading from the database.

I then swapped the template I was using for a default one and the dollar signs re-appeared. So this meant it was my template. The only non-standard thing in there was the otherwise wonderful sIFR technique, developed by Mike Industries to replace text with a font of your choice, great for dynamic custom headings. After removing this bit of javascript everything was fine, the dollar signs were back.

So I created a custom page template solely for the required publication type, which didn't require the display of dollar signs but did require the custom heading as provided by the sIFR technique. This allowed the rest of the site to happily display the dollar signs as they should do and the page with the custom headings to display as it should do. Problem solved!

Note that this problem was only arising on a DreamHost account, I couldn't duplicate it locally.