Today I finished restructuring the URL mapping. This is most likely concluding the changes and additions before ZenMagick 0.8.2 gets released. I still need some time for proper testing, though.

The restructured URL mapping is now simpler and still more sophisticated. This is true for usage and implementation.
As for anonymous checkout – I came to the conclusion that it would perhaps be putting too much into a single release. Also, in order to implement that properly there is need for some better access control.

Right now controller rely on zen-cart doing the proper checking and redirecting (modules/pages/xxx/header.php). While this is convenient, it means there is still overhead in terms of database access and setup of model data. So, the plan is to implement a more or less generic access control layer, integrate it with ZMController and make it configurable similar to the new URL mappings. And yes, there are reasons for keeping it separate.

First, there is the fact that URL mapping and access control are not really related. More importantly though, access control should kick in a lot earlier than URL mapping. In particular it should be verified before the cache gets queried.
So, some more exciting things to come – but not in this release

Once that is done it would also mean that processing zen-cart’s header.php files could be disabled (except for the checkout at this time).