In my last post I started a list of things to do before the magic 1.0.0 release. I’d like to keep this post as a reference for things to do. Hopefully, I’ll be adding (and removing!) things often as I go.

Of course, suggestions are highly welcome…

• admin - maintenance
• facets
• other plugins
• make ZMPluginView more useful and start using it (this will require changes to a few plugins that do funny this loading files and eval’ing them…)
• review email templates and integration (plus perhaps a new email service?)
• review the remaining template functions (l10n, i18n)
• alternative shipping/payment/order total modules
  NOTE: This is actually not to replace or reimplement any existing code. However, should plugins wish to implement new modules, that should be possible without relying on globals (in particular as those might not be available using ZenMagick in the first place)
• review the security code - for one thing it’s not possible to have multiple authentication sources (one alternative could probably be OpenID)
• Review and perhaps improve the price/attribute lookup code (reduce database queries)

Also, there are some things that are beyond 1.0.0, but nevertheless worth writing done:

• Start using the alternative bootstrap code (alpha at most at the moment) for all non checkout pages to further reduce the init code
• Redo session handling to start sessions only when really needed (any form of login, cart action, language change)
• Complete template review - refactor some of the view classes, access views and (side-)boxes (and others) via the same view access code. That should allow more fine grained caching. A possible implementation could have a PageView to access the full page and FragmentViews to access smaller bits like boxes, views, etc. However, rather than re-inventing even more wheels it might be more effective to improve the Smarty plugin and probably complete the smarty default theme.
• Have some more themes

Right!
After spending quite some time on fixing regressions from my refactoring madness its finally time to get ready for the next release.

Rather than reiterating the things that have been changed/added/fixed/improved I’d like to talk a bit about what is coming next. I am aware that I never much of a roadmap for ZenMagick. One of the reasons being that there was just too much to do and I never had real priorities. With the changes coming in 0.9.1 there isn’t a lot left to be done for the templating side of things until we’ll eventually hit ZenMagick 1.0. The API, on the other hand, still requires some work.

While the API is pretty much complete as far as the storefront functionallity is concered, it lacks quite a bit when it comes to the admin side. What I mean is the ability to create and update data. While there has been some work in that area, there is still a lot left. As a general rule, create/update functionallity is available where it was needed.

With the introduction of the new database code I hope to finally get this big gap filled and make ZenMagick even more attractive for integrators and people interested in extending zen-cart.

There is also going to be some more work in refactoring the core code. While this is not strictly necessary, I have the urge to do that just to make myself happy (I hope that is reason enough

Parallel to all that there are plans for a lot more work around plugins:

• admin - maintenance
  There are a few plugins that I started, but never finished. Those would make the Catalog Manager a lot more useful. However, those will most likely depend on the missing data access features of the API (namely, creating and updating date like products, categories and other)
• facets
  This is something I started as a reaction to some discussion about alternative ways to navigate the catalog. Eventually, I hope this will be good enough to replace and improve the current result list/filter code (not sure about the sorter, though). It should be more performant (using some form of caching) and generally smarter.
• other
  There are a couple other plugins I can feel coming. This might include some more support plugins for zen-cart mods, but also some new features for the storefront side of things.

Finally, there is more need to trim the code and make it perform better. I plan to have a look at what other PHP based apps do for that and see what seems useful. Suggestions welcome.

So, again, not much of a real roadmap, but I think that a version 1.0 is finally (far, far) far away becoming visible. If you feel I have missed anything important, please, please comment or write me an email.

Happy weekend, everyone

Right, I am just about to check in some new code that makes will make it very easy to import/prepare Creole for the ZenMagick loader architecture. The new (mostly unused) class ZMPhpCompressor also allows to squezze a full Creole release (everything under classes) into a single 188kb file.

I am actually not sure if I should include that already with the next release, as right now there are probably about 3 or four queries per request done by the new API and I might as well stick with the existing code a bit longer - we’ll see.

The code depends on two other ZenMagick classes, so it’s not very portable (if anyone is interested), but apart from that it works fine

The actual code to do the magic looks like this on my XP box:

$creole = 'creole-1.1.0';
zm_creole_import('C:/TEMP/'.$creole);

$comp = new ZMPhpCompressor();
$comp->setRoot(’C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\htdocs\zen-cart\zenmagick\core\ext/’.$creole);
$comp->setOut(’C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\htdocs\zen-cart\zenmagick\core\ext/’.$creole.’.php’);
$comp->setTemp(’C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\htdocs\zen-cart\tmp’);
$comp->compress();

Not sure how often I’ll be using this, but it’s nice not having to try to remember these things once they are needed again!

The only caveeat is that compressing into a single file breaks the Creole ‘dot-path notation’, so in order to use the MySQL driver you’ll need to do something like:

Creole::registerDriver('mysql', 'MySQLConnection');

to avoid errors about missing drivers. Since all database access in ZenMagick is handled by a single database provider class that’s not really an issue, though.

That means the last open issue is to write some proper release notes - oh, well, babysteps

I’ve been trying to get a release together for quite some time now, but as laid out before, I was unable to resist to add this ‘last new feature’ before releasing.

Due to the massive amount of changes (even though old themes will be good with a handful of small changes) I think I’ll actually have a release candidate before doing a proper one.

There are currently three remaining issues, though:

• Creole
  The script to “import” the Creole code (read: fiddle around to make it work with ZMLoader) is still custom and ideally I’d prefer to have a single compressed creole.php file rather than the single files. This will require splitting the core compressor code into a generic bit and the ZenMagick specific parts. Once that is done I’ll be able to compress individual folder and subtrees just as needed.
• Release notes
  My old nemesis. With the growing number of changes it’s becoming imperative to have some good release notes so people can make an informed decision about whether they want to upgrade or not.
  Also, it should contain enough details to make theme migration an easy task
• Time
  As some of you might have noticed I am not online a lot at the moment. There are some good, personal reasons for that so expect this continue for a while.

If anyone is interested to give the current code a try let me know and I’d be happy to put a custom build together for you (there is also the option of accessing the trunk code directly at sourceforge.)