So, finally it’s online. After my last musings about a theme I had another go at finding a suitable design and - voila!

I ma sure it is an improvement over the old homepage and the next version of ZenMagick will include an updated demo theme that corresponds (pretty much) with the new design.

One major change is that the site now is driven by a small number of custom PHP scripts that will make it easier to add stuff. In fact, it’s a mini-MVC application of sorts. Also, adding news is as easy as dropping a HTML file in a folder which is a lot easier than what I had before.

New pages are also just simple PHP views added to a folder and then linked. I might spend a bit more work on that once the next website is demanding similar functionality - it should be very easy to make it generic enough to  reuse.  I might actually write a separate post about that if I find the time.

Speaking of the next release: this is now definitely scheduled for the coming weekend (unless my daughter has different plans). I am still pondering the version number, though. So far I referred to it as 0.8.7, but  sheer number of changes plus the fact that there are some new and exciting changes to the admin pages I am tempted to make it 0.9.0.

I realize that according to some old roadmap it’s too early for 0.9.0, but things change and there are more reasons that might make this a good thing.

• I think it will indicate that ZenMagick  is slowly growing up
• The plugin architecture is nearing maturity; just looking at the number of plugins and the fact that most new features are plugins should already be enough to justify the version number jump.
• I plan to move away from creating new releases for each new version. Rather there will be releases for 0.9.x, 1.0.x, etc. This should make it easier to find things; in particular tracking down plugins seems unnecessary difficult