Let me start by saying that  I do not mean to ridicule anyone, so don’t get me wrong - if this is a rant it’s more about zen-cart and how it forces people to do unreasonable things rather than any contributions or contributors.

Every now and then I browse the contributions section on the zen-cart site to see if there are new mods worth looking at.  I really am amazed that there have been over 600 downloads for a mod named ‘Telephone not required on signup’. This is remarkable on two unrelated levels.

First of all, why would anyone need to change this via an admin control? I know, it’s nice to have choices, but isn’t that too much? How often have you changed the phone number field from mandatory to optional (or vice versa) in the last year?

The second reason is, of course, that in ZenMagick this is possible by commenting out a single line in the validation configuration. Agreed, no nice interface, but then, you don’t need to download a mod, patch a core file and run some custom SQL to get the same result! Your choice…