I’ve been working on yet more cleanup of the startup and init code to move closer to a framework that is generic enough to be used as general PHP framework.

While this is not a top priority, it’s something I enjoy and that also add value to ZenMagick (well, most of the time).

The improvements to the loader have also helped reducing the code in the main init.php file. Although the code got removed from there doesn’t mean that it completely disappeared, though. A lot of it ended up in ZMEventFixes, which now is more of a shopping cart init class rather than just a bunch of things to run in order to make zen cart happy.

The more time I spend on all this there more it feels like each theme is, in fact, a separate application. The only important difference, however, is that they can (and do) depend on each other. Ignoring that for a moment, what do we then have left?A number of themes,  one active at a time (unless using the multi site plugin to allow different domains to point to different themes).

I wonder if eventually it might become feasable to have the webserver’s document root point to a theme folder and really treat each theme as a separate application using the ‘ZenMagick framework‘.

Obviously, the name theme would then not be appropriate any more. Still, all of that is far in the future. One thing is nagging at me, though and that are the theme info classes. Currently, they do not add a lot to the overal architecture. Also, except for the layout settings (specifying that default_layout.php is the default layout file, for example) there isn’t really a lot in there that is still used I’ll have a good think about removing some of it.
In particular the code related to JavaScript does seem a bit old fashioned and with jquery and Co. around, there isn’t much point in configuring JS for each page any more.