I’ve decided I’ll revive the random notes/facts posts. Every so often I see search keywords in the logs and think: Ah, people are looking for that – perhaps I should tell them it’s already there!

So, for today there are two things:

1. Language support for ezpages
   Since ezpages were added to Zen Cart the database table included a language id column. However, the admin interface never supported that. In ZenMagick there has always been a setting to enable/disable using the language id. I don’t think anyone ever used it – mostly because people tend to use the UI to manage ezpages, not straight SQL…
   Now, in the new admin pages there is language support for ezpages. It doesn’t look good yet, but it works!
2. Another thing are RSS feeds.
   Again, there has been RSS support in ZenMagick for a long time. However, during the last few days it has become a lot easier to add new feeds. Not sure how many will be included as default, but there will be a new one that will contain the full catalog – categories and products.
   The main reason is that a new client needs this to drive the site search. The search will be provided by SLI Systems and usually is hosted on their side to make things easier (typically on a subdomain of the main shop site).
   So, again it happens that the requirements of a single user drive innovation for all to enjoy.

Let me finish by adding that the next ZenMagick release will be build on top of whatever 1.3.9 version is available at the time unless there are concerns that the code is still too buggy. However, I guess 1.3.9b – 1.3.9d should have squashed all the bad bugs.

The guys at rubikintegration have been really busy working on a design for all the new admin pages in ZenMagick. And finally, the design is approaching a stage where it is worth sharing it with the world

Of course, it will be a while before this will become reality, but it’s definitely moving and as soon as we have a static HTML/CSS version I’ll be starting to add the layout to the new admin templates.

Thanks for all the hard work (so far and still coming…)

Another week of distractions. Main reason is a new client and that, of course, means different things to do and suddenly new gaps / shortcomings in the code base

So, in that context the following happened:

• I added code that allows to overide the lookup name for singletons. I’ll try to update the wiki with details soon
• useo2: Removed dependency on admin patch classes
• moved more code into apps (both store and admin)
• added convenience __vzm function that behaves the same as zm_l10n\
• cleaned up ZMTools (remove unused methods, etc)
• fixed b:#3014025 – rss feed broken
• Many improvements (not complete yet) to the RSS controller, in particular a nicer way to add custom feeds and a new catalog feed for (either) all products / categories
• Ongoing work on the new admin UI – actually I do not track those changes yet as it is not ready to use and there is nothing to track against (it’s all new, so there doesn’t seem to be much point)
  This forum post has some of the details about that.
• Released a new snapshot

I’ve also seen a pretty final mockup of the new admin interface and it looks great. I’ll post some more abot that soon.

I am not sure – did I forget last weeks update? Any way, things have slowed down a bit due to my new work. Unfortunately, ZenMagick is not yet profitable enough to spend more time on it than I do right now.

OTOH, I am perhaps not the best person to run a business, so I do not know if there is actually hope!

Well, so what happened in the meantime?

• Updated Cache_Lite to 1.7.8 and simpletest to whatever was trunk on 18/05/2010
• Added a new interface for classes that act as user factory. Those classes are responsible to create a valid session user if possible. The SACS handler obviously needs to match for this to work.
• minify now can also group CSS files
• added support for Savant’s filter concept and chucked in a simple filter that supports short tags
• added a new ZMScaffoldController class which is basically a format agnostic version of the Ajax controller. That means it allows to execute arbitrary methods based on requests incl. method level access control. Eventually this could be used for proper scaffolding support.
• Added a new locale service and a default implementation (for the store and admin) that uses the current zm_l10n functions. This service allows also to base translations, etc on pomo or other localisation code.
• Added support for a new validation configuration file (in yaml, of course)
• Improved the ajax support for regular controllers. Part of that was to add an ajax based login script to the demo store using the normal login controller and custom ajax views.
• Added sendmail and PHP support to the mailer service
• Changed the theme folder that contains the email templates from email to emails
• More code cleanup and removal of  ugly code in Runtime.
• Added a new SQL patch to install the new tables for role based admin user authorization
• Added new admin pages to manage admin user (role maintenance add/delete and configuration of roles for each page are still missing, however this already works with the roles coded in the sacs config file)
• added a few new packer classes  for minify and openID

There are still a couple small issues with the new admin code and *nix. Once that is sorted I’ll create a new snapshot. I hope that is going to happen sometime next week – fingers crossed.