I just realized it’s been 10 days since the last update and I generally haven’t been very talkative lately. Nevertheless, things have happened – as usual.

One major thing that happened in the last 10 days was that this blog now is hosted in New Zealand, rather than Germany. More speed for me, but hopefully no major impact for readers.

Most of the coding entered around removing the $zm_ prefix from template vars. With this out of the way there is only one $zm_ variable left: $zm_theme. It’s only used to pull static content and there are several ways to change this:

• Move methods into toolbox
  Not ideal, as these currently support theme inheritance and should be somehow handled by savant to keep all that code in one place.
• Drop static page support
  Not very likely, at least not in the short term.
• Add new methods to ZMSavant to access resources and allow resources to be accessed from everywhere in the theme, not just the content folder. Also, language support would have to be added – also not ideal.
• Convert all static pages to ezpages
  Seems the most sensible way right now, in particular since ezpages are much more powerful, support proper titles and perhaps even meta tags (in the future…)

There is also one additional component to the above and that are l10n chunks. Chunks are something I created to avoid having to have 10 line strings in a l10n map. However, that is just a convenience thing and ideally should not be seem by users at all (and code generally isn’t bothered by things like that…).

One way to start would be to convert chunks to static pages as they are pretty much the same anyway… Doesn’t really help to solve the issue around $zm_theme, but reduces clutter elsewhere. Also, fixing static pages would then be even more appealing.

I also removed a few old plugins from the repo as I won’t touch them in the near future. Reminds me that plugin wiki pages really need to be updated :/

In order to get anywhere with chunks/static pages/ezpages I also extended the ezpages service to allow to create, update and remove ezpages. Adding a new ezpage editor that supports the language flag would be the logical next step, I guess.