While refactoring existing plugins I’ve taken the time to think about which ones to keep and which ones to drop (for now? ever?). Right now I am looking at the dual pricing and the price group plugins.

Two thoughts:

1. The price group plugin should be moved into storefront. There are two good reasons for this. First of all, it would mean not having to subclass ZMProducts. Secondly, it is useful and opens the door for more improvements in that area.
2. #1 actually means that the dual pricing plugin is more or less obsolete.

Opinions?

I figured it’d be good to start writing down the differences between a stock zen-cart and zen-cart as included in a full ZenMagick release.

• All ZenMagick file patches are already applied.
  This can be reversed, of course, by uninstalling those patches.
• Move the extras folder into install_zc.
  This I thought appropriate in light of these two posts.

Apart from those file changes, there is some additional SQL that will get executed during installation:

• The SQL of the two SQL patches as per the ZenMagick installation screen.
  Same as with file patches these can be reversed from within the ZenMagick installation page.
• Default sideboxes SQL
  This script will set up the sideboxes for the ZenMagick default theme.
• Other SQL.
  Collection of misc. SQL. So far it contains:
  • Turn off missing page check
  • Remove all banner

Any other suggestions welcome.

Another interesting week.  Most work centered, again, on plugins.

I went ahead with converting more plugins and now the new plugin conventions are implemented and active. No way back, no way out.

On the plus side, catalog manager plugins are now working too and I am very pleased to say that, with a few small things to iron out, all admin code – admin pages* and plugins – uses regular MVC code. I should add that for a couple more specialized controller classes have been added to accommodate for the admin specific things.

Also, I added a new admin ajax controller to manage plugins. As a first result, the plugin manager now features a clickable enabled/disabled image for installed plugins. Clicking the image will toggle the plugin status. So much faster than uninstalling or ‘Edit’ – ‘Uncheck enabled checkbox’ – ‘Update’.

I think there might have been a few more things, but my mind is a bit blurry right now and there is always the changelog…

I’ve also pondering if I should release another snapshot before the final 0.9.8 release. Seeing that there hasn’t been any substantial feedback on snapshots so far I might skip it. I would expect another week or so, but it should be out for your Christmas break

* Although a controller is involved in all ZenMagick admin pages, it’s jsut the default controller. Until a more general admin refactoring I save my time for more interesting things…

A quick note that new snapshots are available.

If you are already on a snapshot, the mod package should be enough to upgrade – there have been some minor changes to zc-base, but nothing that would require to download it again, unless you plan to use it for production.

The plugins zip is a bit smaller than usual, which reflects the current status of converted/upgraded plugins to the new code.

One known issue is that the Catalog Manager is currently broken. Getting plugins for that working is on my list for next week.
After that I would appreciate some feedback in form of bug reports, etc. as that will be pretty much (really!) what is going to be 0.9.8.

Unless there are some major issues I hope to get 0.9.8 published before Christmas – we’ll see.

I am making quite good progress on converting plugins. However, as already mentioned a couple existing plugins might not make it to the finals.

There are mainly two reasons:

1. I do not have the time/energy to maintain all plugins any more – hopefully integration plugins for zen cart mods will be taken over by some mod owners in the future.
2. Some plugins are just too far away from what I wish they would be and in order to get a release ready they’ll have to wait.

Right now there are about 25 plugins left. Some are rather simple and I might skip testing them (in particular the integration plugins that usually consist of just the plugin class).

Among the plugins still to be done are also the Catalog Manager plugins. Hopefully the time and work I put into the new infrastructure code will pay off to those going without too much trouble

Another rather busy week! The forum slowly gains speed thanks to a few very active members – thanks for that! As a result I’ve spend a reasonable amount of time writing on the forum [and also answering comments here on the blog].

Some of the discussion ended with me refactoring most of the plugin UI code and also (as a precondition) the ZenMagick admin pages code. The result is that now all admin pages are displayed using the same MVC code (or variations of it) as the storefront is using.

The benefit is that ZenMagick admin pages now only consist of the view portion and are also organized similar to what a storefront theme looks like [ content/view folder, etc.].

The downside of this is that all plugins need to be redone. I am right in the middle of that and in most cases it is just changing some class names to follow the new naming conventions. Plugins with admin UI are a bit harder, though.

I expect to get through most of the plugins within the next week. A new snapshot should be ready sometime this weekend, including the already converted plugins.

After some interesting discussions in the comments and also in the new forum, I’ve decided that I’ll add some more changes to the next release regarding plugins.

In fact, it’s a partial rewrite of how plugins generate admin UI content. Precondition for that was to convert all ZenMagick admin pages to using the MVC framework. While this is not complete it now still allows to write proper controller and views for admin pages. A side effect is that it will make it much easier to get to a point where the admin UI could be skinned similar to what themes do for the storefront.

It also means that the new plugin naming conventions will be active in the next release.

I made a small change compared to the previous proposal, though. The word ‘Plugin‘ is now expected to be at the end of the main plugin clas; for example: ‘ZMQuickEditPlugin‘. This means all classes will start with the same plugin specific prefix (‘ZMQuickEdit‘ in the example), which acts as some simple sort of namespace, I guess.

A downside to all of this is that all plugins need to be updated. On the other hand it means I really need to test all of them and I already found a few bugs in existing versions….

I’ll be publishing a new snapshot over the weekend I hope. That should also include the latest zen cart XSS patch in zc-base.