That’s right, I had cookie validation enabled. Once I removed it, the cookie appeared in yii variables!
So, either I will go on using $_COOKIE or I will disable validation. If you can tell me some way to create yii-validated cookies through jquery cookie, let me know.
I think you have to send an ajax request to set a “yii-validated” cookie, because only Yii knows the private key used to generate cookie hash. I guess you don’t want to keep it in javascript code