A quick heads up on the current ZenMagick development. Aside from the odd bug fixes I am quite happy with the result.

Currently, as it happens, I am working on email support. It’s a funny one.

It has been at the back of my mind for quite some time. Now with the theme stuff out of the way it seemed something worth looking into. Despite my initial fears it turned out to be quite fun, as the code will be reusing lots of the views code

On closer inspection, though, things got messy again. The way zen_mail handles the HTML and text version of the email are not as simple as expected (I am still optimistic sometimes). Well, so it was time for another patch

So now I have both the order confirmation and forgotten password email handled by ZenMagick and it can handle whatever you like I might add a few more templates to make it worthwile switching.

A bonus is, that the code can handle *all* emails; including the ones generated via the admin interface!

For each email there are two equal views to generate contents; a HTML and a text version. One is required, both is good!

Another side effect is that the l10n code now has something to support larger bits of localizable text. I call them chunks and they can be stored in the themes language directories in plain text files. Access is via zm_l10n_chunk_get(..), which works similar to zm_l10n_get(..). Only difference is, that the first argument is a filename (without the .txt) rather than text. THe optional other parameters work the same (substitution of %s, etc). Neat, eh?

Other things are internal and involve changes to the build system. One new thing might be a file log documenting changed files and also incremental updates that contain changed files only. We’ll see…