Yes, still plugins. Seems I have started really underestimated this. On the other hand it shows that plugins are a quite powerful thing and need some time to tame!

I really want to get this right (don’t get me wrong, that’s generally the case), but here it seems even more important. If plugins do work I might be able to switch from working on ZenMagick to working on plugins for quite some time. Actually, that is what I am doing right now, and in doing so I find and fix existing bugs and extend the plugin architeture at the same time!

Focus is on various Google tools related plugins that require quite different ways of accessing data/contents. So far there is code for sideboxes, event handling (zen-cart only for now) and contents filter. Contents or page filter are a means for plugins to manipulate the contents generated by the controller/view before it gets returned to the client.

Filters seem to be a nice way to be able to insert pieces of code into the final page without having to add callbacks or APIs for each point of the final page contents that needs to be accessible. on the other hand, they might rely on having properly formatted contents in order to identify the area of contents they want to manupulate.

Performance is perhaps a bit lower at the moment due to the additional processing required. Tuning will be part of later releases as has been practice before.

One thing that definitely is going to change is the plugin class itself. Currently I have a few things marked deprecated (mostly stuf that is there to make plugins compatible with zen-cart modules) that might go sooner rather than later. Reason for that is that I am not quite happy with the current limited way of managing (plugin) configuration values. I really would like to be able to have one or more actual configuration pages that get generated by the plugin rather than just a restrictive form. For example, I can’t see a proper way of having simple links or other contents that might be useful for the plugin. (A plugin might want to offer links to export data, etc.)

So most likely zen-cart compatibility will go as some point in time. I suppose this will also be the time to address the issue of storing ZenMagick config values somewhere different than in a plain .php file…

PS: I’ve got the feeling I might have repeated a few things here from previous posts. If so, sorry, I hope there was still something useful in here.