Preparations for starting to use the symfony routing component are almost complete. This will replace the current url mappings – another piece of ZenMagick code retired in favour of a proven, externally maintained component.

With the url mappings gone things will be a lot easier and perhaps it will even be possible to drop the sacs mappings as well – although the sacs (access control code) will most likely stay as it is.

There are a few more components to refactor and reconsider, for example validation and form handling. Once those are sorted there will hopefully be time again to work on real features, rather than rewriting the framework over and over again.

Using symfony will hopefully allow us to do that. It has a huge user base, active development and should allow to concentrate more on the actual shop development – and with that improving online shopping with ZenMagick..

Finally some more progress – and almost visible

I’ve created a new (empty) app for the store-installer to come. Things will start humble, but I hope over time this will grow into the kind of installer we’ve all been dreaming about…

With all the infrastructure work on ZenMagick, there is unfortunately not much progress in terms of real features.

One thing I managed to do today, tough, is coming close to progress. The new email code now properly supports zencart smtpauth option and does work with gmail out-of-the-box.

So, not really a new feature, but satisfying nevertheless