As part of the admin upgrade I am looking at improvements for the plugin manager.

So far the following changes have been made or are planned:

• Simplified view
• Drag&Drop to reorder (this means hiding the sort_order field)
• Ajax enable/disable in overview
• New ‘Upgrade’ option that re-installs the plugin as part of software upgrades
• Option to keep settings when un-installing a plugin
• Popup Edit dialog (loaded via Ajax)

The popup edit dialog still needs some more specs. For one thing this only makes sense if the plugin has real options – enable/disable and sort order will be managed via the overview (see list above).

Another issue is that some plugins currently provide their own implementation. There will need to be some code to figure that out and change the link accordingly.

I still like the idea of plugins being able to add menu items as they wish. With a new menu system it is planned to provide methods/options to add items anywhere, but some of that will depend on the menu structure itself, I guess.

Things done

• Fill a few more gaps in the generic MVC code
• Fix quite a few regressions on trunk code (Thanks, Nathan!)
• Add fulltext support to the product search (Again, thanks Nathan!)
• Add a few more options to the pageStats plugin (as suggested by Nathan)
• Added a new class ZMPhpSourceAnalyzer that I’ll fill with the actual logic to create core.php
• Added upgrade option to the new Plugin Manager

Things NOT done

• Work on site relaunch – I am still looking for some marketing person / writer that could create some meaningful content for the main site
• Pretty much everything else listed on the 0.9.10 roadmap :<

I have to admit that I immensely enjoyed this week as it was the first time I actually received proper patches to fix/improve ZenMagick. It’s been great and I do hope it’s not over yet

This, IMHO, is the proof that my claim that ZenMagick is a project that people can influence is true! Changes I didn’t plan include:

• MySQL fulltext support for the product search
• Performance improvements to ZMCategories (for large databases)
• Performance improvements to the product search (without fulltext)

BTW: The new code to improve core.php generation is actually not really just for that. It works so far, but it is not complete. I found out about that trying to compress the source for Swift Mailer. Swift Mailer is a library to send emails. Zen Cart announced this for their 2.0 release, so I figured it might be good as email API for the generic code.

If there are good libraries around, please let me know – this isn’t decided yet.

Just a little reminder for myself about how to set up memcache on XP:

1. Start here
2. Download the dll from pierre
3. For stats and stuff listen to myself

It’s been a busy week and a half and the code shuffle is slowly taking shape.

Pretty much all of my time spend on ZenMagick since the release have been around breaking the current lib/store folders up into shared, store and admin code.
Since the loader takes care of all dependencies no matter where files are this was relatively painless. I’ve added a new option to bootstrap.php so MVC apps can opt-in to loading a single additional folder (shared in this case). The reason this is opt-in is that it allows the sample app to keep working without change.

There have been a number of fixes along the way and many improvements to the MVC code in general.

One of the things I like about this change is that pretty much all code is now in the zenmagick folder and the files that need to be added to zencart is reduced to the absolute minimum.

One detour last week was adding/improving some of the code to be better about handling large databases. A kindly provided large database (19000+ products and 5000+ categories) makes testing these issues now a lot easier…
ZMCategories still needs some work, but I’ve got some ideas for that too.

I should perhaps add that the current reorganization isn’t just another rearrangement of files and folders. It means that the admin interface becomes a separate MVC application and will be mostly independent of zen cart code. The only files referenced are:

require_once ZC_INSTALL_PATH.'admin/includes/configure.php';
require_once DIR_FS_CATALOG.DIR_WS_INCLUDES.'filenames.php';
require_once DIR_FS_CATALOG.DIR_WS_INCLUDES.'database_tables.php';

This, of course, means some additional work to convert existing admin pages. Once that is done, adding new ones will be as simple as adding a new storefront page!

It was pointed out to me that ZenMagick is lacking a few bells & whistles. Well, I always thought that if I do the heavy lifting eventually there would be some users that could create some more lightweight plugins, wrapping up their theme/template work.

To encourage people to do so and to illustrate that it isn’t that hard to convert existing Zen Cart template mods, I’ve checked in two new plugins:

• flyoutCategories
  A port of the css_flyout_menu mod.
• jscrollerSideboxes
  Ported jscroller-sidebox-2.1.

It really isn’t that hard – you really should give it a go and if you need help there is always the forum. Now back to some more serious work, because these two plugins have revealed that resources in plugins (ie. .css and .js files) are not really that well integrated into the layout mananger code.
The downside of that is that they can’t take advantage of things like the minify plugin, and more…