I’ve been slowly preparing things for a new admin UI for all ZenMagick admin pages. The biggest step has been to remove all individual admin pages (zmInstallation.php, etc) in favour of a single point of entry zmIndex.php.

Within that file, the main_page parameter is used to dispatch the request. Right now this is done manually and the layout is included in zmIndex.php. Views itself are already working the same as in storefront, so there is a content/views subdirectory containing views for all ZenMagick admin pages.

Now, to get to state where zmIndex.php becomes the sibling of zenmagick/store.php, only two things need to happen:

1. A default_layout.php file needs to be added to admin/content
2. zmIndex.php needs to be changed to call ZMDispatcher::dispatch($request);

Right now this does work with one major exception: the included zencart header.php relies on globals (as does the whole init process).

I do hope that for the new admin UI the header will not have to contain a lot of code. All the stuff currently displayed above the navigation should move into the dashboard to make things more consistent. It would also be nice to have a dynamic dashboad where things can be moved around and enabled/disabled.

For example, the update check should be just another option in the dashboard. That would also mean that automatic checks will only happen on the index page and not on other pages. Furthermore, that should be doe via ajax to avoid delays loading one of the central pages.

Once we are that point, I’d really like to get the login process upgraded. Not only would that avoid some of the current code mess, but it would also allow to redirect after the login, just like the storefront does.

We’ll see…