Today was another day where a chain of events got me sidetracked. A post in ZenMagick’s sourceforge.net help forum was written by someone that is involved in zen-cart Xoops integration project.

That sounded like something that could be interesting for ZenMagick, too, so I had a closer look and next thing I read that Xoops is using the Smarty templating engine.

So, I dive into that as that was something that had me pondering before. I spend enough time to download and install Smarty and get the demo code from the installation page working.

After that is was around 30 minutes to write a very crude ZenMagick plugin that included a custom ZMView implementation to use Smarty to display a response based on templates located in a custom ZenMagick theme.

It has still a few hardcoded dependencies and other oddities, but it’s already a proof of concept. (For one thing I have no idea how emails would work yet, even though that should be following the same patterns.)

The theme structure would have to be different from a normal PHP based theme, though.