In principle, the Smarty plugin is finished, except for email handling. One additional bonus I found is the integrated caching.

The custom theme supports now the same layout config mechanism that all ZenMagick themes use (ie default_layout, etc..) and the name of the content view is passes as $view_name into the main template.

Downsides so far: It would be required to write Smarty function plugins as wrapper for all ZenMagick/zen-cart functions that we need to use. So, maybe I’ll leave it as proof-of-concept and hope someone else might be keen to write all of those

I also need to investigate as to how sideboxes would work as they tend to do some processing themself. In the worst case custom SMarty plugins would need to be written to provide the functionallity/data required. In a way this would actually be quite neat as it translates into custom controller code for sideboxes which would only be executed when used!

Stay tuned