Lately, I have been wondering if zen-cart really needs the sidebox manager. Sure, it is nice to have an admin interface to configure sideboxes. However, the question is: ‘Do we really need a GUI for something that gets touched very rarely. I would expect that for most sites this is actually a one-off thing.

So, wouldn’t it be better to leave the decision about sideboxes to the template? In fact, that would be much more in line with the ZenMagick approach of *not* supporting layout/design aspects via configuration options.

One benefit would be that it wouldn’t be necessary to create sidebox dummy files any more. Themes could have custom sideboxes, or even content that is spread across multiple files without having to worry about anything.

I guess one reason why I personally do not like the current system is that it is one of the last bits of logic that rely on files rather than code.

Oh, well, just my thoughts – luckily things work well enough as they are so there is no imminent need to change more than necessary