In case anyone didn’t get what my last post was about – ZenMagick has been kicked of the zen-cart site, reason being that ZenMagick is now considered a fork!

I am still not sure if I should feel honored or offended; I guess this could be taken as acknowledgment of what I am doing (or, at least, trying to do).

On the other hand I would not consider ZenMagick a fork, at least not in the traditional sense. My understanding of a fork would be to take a given version and start implementing my own changes.

ZenMagick, on the other hand, started as some simple customizations. If I remember right, the first bit of code was around looking up product and category data. Once I realized that having my own version of a MVC architecture things became very different very fast.

Most overlap of in code is now probably in price/tax calculation code and perhaps the fact that ZenMagick is compatible with zen-cart. The conclusion for me is that ZenMagick is not so much a clone, but a separate application that just happens to be compatible on database level.

There are reasons that it is not a fork, though. For one thing, zen-cart is absolutely required in order to use ZenMagick. Of course, I could just merge both and have a stand-alone ZenMagick distribution. However, there is way too much zen-cart code and I do not feel like maintaining all of that.

Back to reality and the question: Where does all that lave ZenMagick?

From my point of view nothing is going to change. Obviously it will be a lot harder for new people to find ZenMagick as a zen-cart add-on. I guess I’ll have to find new ways to promote my work. Any help in this matter would be great – say, digging www.zenmagick.org, posting about ZenMagick in forums or blogs, perhaps even writing a wiki article

Finally, let me add that I feel secretly a bit proud as well. Considering that ZenMagick was and still is a one person project there is undenyably a feeling of having archived something!