Christmas is approaching fast and it is time to prepare for the (traditional) ZenMagick Christmas release. We’ haven’t always managed, but always aimed for having one.
This year is no difference and things are looking promising.

I am sure we will have to push a few tasks into the next release, but that is more a matter of organizing issues. Some surely should be ‘meta’ issues and have subtasks. Alternatively, we could probably have an ‘ongoing’ target that never expires.

Regression fixing is well under way and there is even a store online that uses a RC version of 0.9.13. All good signs that the code is ready to be released.

Last week I was pointed to a discussion thread about ZenMagick in a german forum. One thing that came up was the fact that ZenMagick has still more than 100 bugs before a potential 1.0 release.

This referred to the ZenMagick issue tracker. It might be good to point out that this is, in fact, not quite true. The issue tracker is used to track bugs, features and general tasks. So, as of now there are 16 bugs in the issue system.

Of those 16 bugs there are none that are critical. So, what I am saying is that ZenMagick is really quite usable – and there are new stable versions every 3-5 month.

I just transferred ownership of the toolbarmode Firefox extension – finally someone picked up my work and is keen to update this nice little helper.
All the best…

Had a bit of fun today with running out of disk space for the demo site.

Investigation showed that the zencart debug code was active and I was looking at 5000+ myDEBUG-xxxxxxxxx.log files in the cache folder. Since I do not have ssh access I came up with this to run in the console….

$dir = DIR_FS_CATALOG.'cache/';
$handle = @opendir($dir);
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
if (!is_dir($dir.$file)) { unlink($dir.$file); }
}
@closedir($handle);

Lots of work – lots of fun.

Since the last update there has been again a lot more work removing dependencies on zencart. Part of that included dropping some plugins that contained a lot of zencart code (mostly zen_xxx methods).

Those plugins might not be lost forever, but if someone really wants them they might have to be willing to get their hands dirty…

That’s about it, really.