It’s been a good week for ZenMagick.

The plugin architecture got streamlined a bit and should be faster, too. In particular, the storefront code will only load plugins that are actually enabled (and installed!).

There have been also some additions that allow plugins now to add custom validation rules and run custom SQL code. The second is particular handy, as it removes a manual step from the installation process.

I have managed to add two plugins this week and I am sure this will make some people quite happy.

1. ImageHandler2
   This is actually a quite simple plugin. All it does is override the class ZMImageInfo. The hard bit was to implement ZMImageInfo to allow that in the first place
   Still, a much wanted and neccessary exercise, since this makes the whole image handling a lot simpler and removes a couple image related functions from ZenMagick that I always wanted to get rid of.
   It is still required to download and install ImageHandler2, though.
2. CAPTCHA TTF
   This is an all inclusive plugin based on this captcha mod. The plugin comes with a modified captcha class to make things work and is the first plugin to use the new SQL patch function. (I had to modify the SQL too due to escaping problems).
   This is an all inclusive plugin.

I also looked at the zen_lightbox mod, but after inspecting the code I decided that this could be better done from scratch. So there is now a Lightbox2 sample in the demo theme. It’s pretty much out-of-the-box lightbox code with just the image path adjusted to work within a ZenMagick theme.

So, I am off into a, hopefully, quiet weekend.