I figured it is time to write an update on plugin development. Since most work these days is on plugins (and the corresponding changes to core to make them work, of course!), that’s where most of my spare time goes.

A number of different things are happening at the same time, thus slowing things down a bit..

• Product associations
  I haven’t made much progress here. My initial investigaion into jquery 1.3 was not very successful – I guess it will need some more time for plugin coders to catch up with the new version.
  Only progress is that there is now an Ajax controller that allows to lookup existing associations. Next step will be to implement creating/updating associations and then I should be able to finally work on the general UI and hook it all up.
• Settings
  After an email conversation with one of our clients I have started working on a settings plugin. The plan is to have a nice UI to create new settings rather than editing the global local.php file.
  Of course, this did not go without creating some unexpected work! To make things look nice and customizable, I’ve started working on something that has been on my list for a while: widgets.
  Widgets are an object oriented version of Zen Cart’s zen_cfg_xxxx() functions [for example: zen_cfg_select_drop_down()]. The advantage of using classes is that it is possible to:
  • customize the UI
    This is possibly not that important, but just fun to have. For example, I’ve created a boolean form widget that can either render as radio button group or select/dropdown.
  • Each widget can have different parameter
    Since widgets are configured as bean using a GET parameter style (name=deng&foo=bar), it’s easy to implement and configure custom properties for each widget
• Subscriptions
  One of my clients is very close to moving a new plugin to production that allows customers to subscribe to orders. This means they can select from a range of schedules (weekly, monthly, etc.) and new orders will be generated automatically.
  The only manual step is that payments are not integrated. The current payment API is tricky at best and messing even more was nothing I fancied. If the plugin proves useful it might be something for the future.
  At this stage I’ll hold off releasing this to the public until we’ve got some live data to see how well this is working.