As of 0.8.3, ZenMagick includes native support for checkout without registering. I call it guest checkout as there are now three different types of users/accounts as far as ZenMagick is concerned:

• Anonymous
  The default state for new users.
• Guest
  All required is an email address plus the required information at checkout time (shipping/billing address, etc).
• I
  Fully registered (logged in) users

The distinction between Guest and Registered is that guest accounts do not have a password (in fact, the password field in the database is empty). Right now there is no admin support to identify such orders.

The login will display a second form with just an email address field, if the cart is not empty and an anonymous user tries to checkout.

It is possible to checkout as guest using the same email address over and over. Also the same email address can be used to register without any overlap.

For guest checkouts, the order confirmation page will display a link to the order status check page that can be used to display the order details of guest orders; order number and email address are required in order to do so.

There are a couple new settings that control behavior around the guest checkout:

• isLogoffGuestAfterOrder
  If set to true, guest users will be logged off after checkout. If set to false, guest users will be able to reuse addresses until they log off or the session is ended otherwise.
• isGuestCheckout
  Main switch to enable/disable guest checkout.

(NOTE: The zen-cart option ALLOW_GUEST_TO_TELL_A_FRIEND corresponds to the ZenMagick setting ‘isTellAFriendAnonymousAllow‘ to be in line with the new account types.)

For the technical inclined I’d like to add that there are some additional checks around billing/shipping address in ZMEventFixes.php to ensure that they exist if required, as zen-cart does not do that itself.