I am happy to announce the availability of ZenMagick 0.9.13.

It’s been a long time coming and it does include a number of good things.

One thin is definitely the extended use of the sfymfony2 dependency injection container.

A lot more framework code changes are centred around streamlining configuration and customization and having a clean system to change the default behaviour will hopefully pay of in the near future.

Finally, the groundwork is in place to tackle a proper checkout API.

I’ve started preparing for the next release. Part of that is going through the remaining issues for 0.9.13 and deciding what to do.

Right now the last open issue (apart from the tracker issue for changes) is to create a UI for blocks. While the infrastructure is almost in place there is still too much to do to realistically get that finished and halfway tested before Christmas. Therefore I have sadly had to decide to move that issue to 0.9.14 as well as a few others that I already moved last week.

Nevertheless, 0.9.13 is going to be a great release with lots of stuff and there is still a chance that the ZC Admin Integration will make it, to add even more.

Other than that I have used part of the testing to use ZenMagick against the german (.at) version of zencart. While things looked rosy for me I’ve had reports of other people struggling. Since most of those issues were file permission related I can’t really tell if there is anything in ZenMagick that would need to be improved (apart from having a separate installer with lots of error detection upfront!).

Today the first ZenMagick 0.9.13 release candidate has been published.

Right now only the mod version is available. Themes, plugins and the full-release version might be added later this week.

This version is labelled release candidate  despite the fact that there are still a few issues open that might include further code changes. The rationale behind this is that the code is quite stable and the remaining issues won’t affect this. There is also a chance that some or all will be moved over to 0.9.14 should they not be ready for the final release.

The build has been tested on top of the current german zencart version.

Right now there aren’t any release/update notes available. People interested in trying the new code are encouraged to check out the issue documenting required changes.

If you happen to come across ZenMagick and wonder if there are sites out there using it, there is a (non comprehensible) list of sites. (Might need some checkout again, though)

Things are progressing fine and we are heading towards a nice release before the end of the year. Right now the plan is to wait for the zencart admin integration as the cutting point.

All non complete issues left will be moved to 0.9.14. Some might have noticed that a lot of the issues not yet started have already changed target

The admin integration will hopefully mean that people won’t need to use the zencart UI any more, except perhaps in a few edge cases we are currently not covering well – I am really looking forward to feedback from this feature.

There have been a number of regression fixes lately, so using the current trunk code should be reasonably safe. A snapshot should be available soon…