Well, this week was dominated by more cleanup in the MVC code and improvements to plugins.

After some unsuccessful attempts to patch the zen cart installer I picked up a suggestion by Raine about coding conventions. In particular plugins are not well covered so far. I did some coding to see how easy it would be to implement the new conventions and, not surprisingly, it wasn’t bad at all!

So, the code to enforce the new conventions is in place, it’s just disabled. Why? Because it means *all* plugins need to be updated in order to work with the new code. I’ve actually started converting them and I am up to 13, still counting.

So, depending on how many plugins UI manage to convert I’ll decide about enabling the new code or not.

I’ve also spend some time looking at potential admin themes, but nothing more has happened so far. Since it looks like nobody has a real opinion on this I might just go for something I fancy

Working on plugins again has yielded some unexpected benefits – I finally have a good reason to go over all plugins and bring them up to speed with code changes where required. It doesn’t mean that all are broken, but there a re quite a few that still use old/deprecated code. In particular I am working on getting some reasonable code together to make adding admin pages as simple as possible.

Accessing plugin contents from store code is also on that list. That will allow templates to reference / include plugin files either as plain files or as URL. Will be interesting to see how that goes with the new Savant views…

Oh, and I spend a bit of time finding a bug that eventually turned out to be calling a __construct() method on a parent that didn’t have a constructor! Sigh…