Since zen-cart removed the ZenMagick download and support thread from their site I am a bit stuck with reaching a wider audience. I’d anticipate spending a bit more time on promoting ZenMagick than before.

This is not entirely bad and something I was planning on tacking at some point anyway, so it’s just a bit earlier than expected.

I’ve submitted ZenMagick as a project to a few websites, visible results might take a while, though. I also already received one warning for ‘Marketplace Avoidance/Fee Circumvention‘, so I’ve got to be a bit more careful with that!

Any suggestions in that area would be very welcome and probably be in the interest of everyone following this blog.

Database stats

When looking at the database query/timing stats of the page stats plugin, it is important to notice that when using ZMZenCartDatabase as database provider for ZenMagick numbers are not what they seem.

The $db stats will include all ZMZenCartDatabase queries as internally $db is used. That means to really understand what is happening it is sometimes easier to use ZMCreoleDatabase as provider.

Caching

I checked in some changes to decouple the cache type parameter (looking up a ZMCache implementation) from the actual implementation [class name].

The advantage is that now implementations can be configured for each type. In order to make this actually useful a new cache implementation using memcache was added!

I recently registered ZenMagick on the ohlo.net website.

If you ever wondered where other projects get the funny stats from, like number of lines of code, estimated cost, # of developers, etc. – this is one way of doing it.

Until I find the time to add that to zenmagick.org,  here are the general stats – not too bad and effort if I am allowed to say that!

Examine database without additional tools

Yesterday I needed to check a database table on a remote site. Since there was no access to phpMyAdmin or similar I was a bit stuck.

I started thinking about using the PHP console that comes with ZenMagick and the result was the following line which will dump a bit of information about the customers table:

var_dump(ZMRuntime::getDatabase()->getMetaData('customers'));

Running actual SQL should be possible in similar fashion.

Changing the default / homepage

Getting bored with your homepage as the default page? Try this:

ZMUrlMapper::instance()->setMappingInfo('index', array('viewId' => 'index', 'view' => 'login', 'controller' => 'LoginController'));

As promised, a quick update that the demo store has been updated.

I will make the new themes available ASAP, we’ll see how that goes. The build process is in place (mostly), but I can’t find the motication to fight with sourceforge at the moment.

Anyway, comments and patches welcome

I’ve started working in earnest working on some themes. They might not be perfect, but good enough to show that things are easier than expected

Since I am not a designer and there haven’t been any volunteers yet, I picked some designs from styleshout and used that as starting point.

To make things a bit easier, they’ll have hardcoded sideboxes and in a couple cases page specific CSS. All in all not too bad, considering that I spend perhaps 6-8 hours in total adapting 2 separate designs. To be fair, the HTML/CSS are similar structured, so things are not as impressive as that might sound.

Still, just converting the typical index.html from a static HTML page into a proper ZenMagick theme layout file is not that hard!

Best of all, the themes will be on the demo site soon-ish. For that occasion I’ve created a new plugin to allow users to switch between themes! To be clear, this is not just a CSS style switch, but a proper switch between themes!
I’ll write an update once everything is live.

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!