This post is inspired by a question about what is not implemented in ZenMagick compared to zen-cart. The list might not be complete, but that’s all I can think of at the moment…

First of all, ZenMagick is not a full e-commerce system

This seems quite obvious, but there have been questions about installing it without zen-cart.

So, yes, you will need to install zen-cart and configure it before it is possible to add ZenMagick to the equation.

ZenMagick is not justanother mod

While some people might disagree, I think that mods usually are patches and bits of code to add/change/remove a particular feature in zen-cart.

ZenMagick, on the other hand, provides a full MVC style templating mechanism including many thins zen-cart is not.

ZenMagick does not work with other zen-cart mods

As explained elsewhere, mods do not work with ZenMagick themes. This is perhaps the biggest drawback and one of the main reasons for trying to have a good enough plugin architecture to make up for it.

The default theme ignores most of the storefronf configuration settings

This is actually a deliberate decision I made quite early. As explained on the ZenMagick website, the default theme is foremost a proof of concept to make sure everything is actually working (most of the time).

ZenMagick is for people that want to mess with the layout and need full control. Implementing all the if ... else ... that are in zen-cart templates to accomodate the GUI configuration options would, in my view, just obscure things.
There are things that ZenMagick suppors, for example:

• enable/disable column left/right
• optional customer attributes (gender, company, state, etc)
• wether coupons are enabled
• etc.

If you are looking for aprticular things, check zenmagick/core/settings/settings.php. All zen-cart options implemented are set up here as ZenMagick settings.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t implement zen-cart options yourself, though. All zen-cart settings are available via the same defines. For example, should you be desperate to have support for category list formatting, there is nothing stopping you from creating code in your theme files like:

if (PRODUCT_LIST_CATEGORY_ROW_STATUS == 0) {
...
} else {
...
}

It’s just that ZenMagick and in particular the default theme are not going to implement most of those options.

ZenMagick is not supporting special modules

This means, I do not guarantee support for payment/order_total modules that need special code, like PayPal, etc. It might be enough to copy the special code from pages like tpl_checkout_payment_default.php into the corresponding ZenMagick theme file (checkout_payment.php), but I haven’t tested that.