Having had some email conversations about current and coming ZenMagick features, I think it is time to write a bit about the short-to-medium term plans for ZenMagick. Also, I realise that the TODO list is not very readble (not even Iuse it very often…)

The next release, which is almost complete, will be 0.6.3 and will contain some bugfixes and quite a few changes to improve performance. I’ve been using xdebug lately and it is a quite valuable tool. I might try other products as well, but for now I am happy enought with it.

0.7.0

This is going to be a tough one as the plan is to finally get around doing the changes to the theme handling code. It’s a big chunk, as theme code is spread all over the place.
Also, there are a number of loose ends that I never managed to tighten up. The date validation class is a good example for that. This would also be a good time to go through all the TODO comments that are left in the code!

0.8.0 - 1.0.0

At this stage, most of the request handling should be good enough to leave it for a while. That means there should be time to implement some new features. Possible candidates are

• Extensions to ZenMagick features; this could be feature groups, default values, assigning groups to products/categories
• more caching options; I am toying with the idea of a ZMSideBox class that would wrap sideboxes. That means sideboxes could have their own cache incl. settings etc.
• Some more admin features
• Find a better place for ZenMagick settings and a user interface to manage them
• There a a few thingsin the loader that are still missing to make it truly a fully functional loader
• review the code to access ZenMagick from external apps
• i10n changes (more on this another time)
• review db handling - this is just a personal preference as I do not like the current way too much
• Proper SEO URLs for categories and products

A separate topic will be to get the API into shape for updates. So far ZenMagick has been rather *passive* just pulling code out of the database. I’d like to be able to do at least some stuff myself. This will tie in nicely with the validation code and make it much easier to switch fields from mandatory to optional and vice versa without the need to patch zen-cart.