Time for another update – not the weekly one but just about the catalog manager refactoring.

The last few days I finally had a serious stab at getting this to work and I think I’ve got the basics done (screenshot at the end).
Things do not look spectacularly different from the old code, so don’t expect too much right now. However, it looks like we’ll be able to get the main layout done properly in the next week or two.

Finally, I’ve just added the task ‘Create standalone admin installer’ to my list and I’d like to mention that to hopefully get some feedback on that.

Since the new admin UI is completely separate, it is absolutely possible to run that without any other storefront/templating code. I wonder if that would be attractive as a first step to migrate to ZenMagick (should someone wish to do so). Also, no matter what, the more the merrier, so even if people would just use the admin app it would mean a lot more exposure (and finding bugs

It’s good to finally see some light at the end of the tunnel. The trip is far from being over, but at least there is now a degree of certainty about whether things will work or not.

Once the admin is stable (not complete, just everything working) it will be a lot easier to work on adding features, etc. Also, at that point there will be some more changes to the store code to catch up with all the good stuff that got created to make admin (and the MVC code in general) better.

And, once all that is done it really is time for a 1.0 release! Way to go, but it doesn’t look as impossible as, say, 6 month ago.

I just found out that, in its latest incarnation, jstree supports jquery themeroller – just what I needed! The tree is coming along nicely now, although a lot now depends on creating a proper theme…

Things have, again, been revolving around the new admin UI. I’ve made substantiel progress with the nagivation, although it is not final. Also, there is no actual design applied yet which means unless elements are created by jquery there isn’t much style at all.

On the plus side it looks like it might be possible to style most of the UI using the jquery themeroller.

As usual there have been some improvements and additions to core and store code along the way, however nothing substantial this week with perhaps one exception: I’ve added support for user based authorization. That means it is now possible to control access to admin pages by granting permission to a role (group) or individual users. (Still no UI to manage this, sorry).

As far as UI content is concerned I’ve done lots of small improvements and prepared almost all content for translation.

The biggest chunk of work this week was spend on providing a way to manage all zencart configuration options in the new admin UI. As it turned out, using widgets to render the form elements was really as easy as I had hoped! That means no need to load additional zencart code at all. For the technically inclined, the code parses the set function value and then it’s more or less just a switch to select and populate the appropriate form widget.

Finally, because I am a bit proud a nice new screenshot:

The new dashboad is coming nicely and actually is much fun. It’s derived from jquerys portlet demo (which shows!), however I’ve already added quite a few things.

Except for the styling the UI is pretty much finished with the exception of:

• UI to configure the dashboad (columns, what else??)
• UI to handle dashboard widget options
• persistence of dashboad and widgets

Another week flying by… According to the changelog not much has changed, but that is not the whole truth. At least as far as changed files are concerned this was a most sucessful week! I’ve updated all of ZenMagick to using the new locale l10n functions. Luckily a lot of that was scriptable, but all cases involving parameters had to be done by hand…

Apart from that most of the things happening have been already documented in the previous mini-update.

There are two more things worth mentioning, though.

Firstly, I fixed a long standing (although unknown) bug that prevents product view count updates. So if you’ve ever wondered about that – this is why :<

The other thing is an issue around products with attributes on 1.3.9.x. Not sure why, but if you have a product with attributes in the cart and try to check out you either get a timeout (the default 30sec.) or out of memory – whichever happens to be first.
I haven’t managed to figure out what is going on, though. Once that is fixed I’ll do another snapshot and move back to the admin UI.

As far as the 0.9.10 release is concerned, I’ve just moved all things open from the 0.9.9 roadmap to 0.9.10. Not sure how much I’ll actually manage to do, but at least things are not forgotten. Currently the plan is to finish the new admin code up to a point where it provides at least as much functionality as the current code. At that point I think the next release will be ready. It is perhaps one of the biggest changes ever, although templates are luckily not that much affected. Yay!

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…)

With the final shuffling of code and splitting up into shared, storefront and admin code I need/want to reorganize all phpdoc package names.

I think for lib/core and lib/mvc I will leave the current org.zenmagick.core and org.zenmagick.mvc packages as that is what they are.

For the actual application code I currently plan to use something shorter like:

• zenmagick.store.core
  The shared code
• zenmagick.store.sf
  Storefront specific code (located under zenmagick/apps/store/lib)
• zenmagick.store.admin
  Admin specific stuff (localted under zenmagick/apps/admin/lib)

BTW: I did some testing with the new admin code and renaming the admin folder works as-is, so no further changes needed. This for all the folks that feel renaming the admin folder makes things more safe.

Another side effect of the restructuring is that it allows to copy the app/store folder and have multiple stores running on the same codebase with just the store specific stuff different, although there might be a few more things to do before that works properly…

The above changes also mean there will be most likely two separate apidocs packages. One for the actual core/mvc code and one for the store application (strorefront/admin) code.

I’ve had quite a bit of fun with the latest version of jquery and the jquery UI widgets. Slowly things are coming together, so after the fold there is a screenshot of the current state of the improved Plugin Manager.

(more…)

One of the things I was looking really forward is currently happening: the ZenMagick admin pages are morphing into a real separate application on top of the ZenMagick MVC code.

Most of the code is shared with the storefront project, which, in turn, is becoming more and more of a real application too!

However, the real difference is that now the admin pages work without zen-cart’s application_top.php! In fact, the only zen-cart files used are (in that order): configure.php, filenames.php and database_tables.php.

I have to admin that this is one of the best things I’ve done within the ZenMagick project for a long long time. It’s great to see all the different pieces suddenly working together, exactly the way it has been planned all along.
Of course, not everything worked out-of-the-box, but expecting that would have been just a bit too much.

Along the way there have been numerous improvements to the MVC code itself, in particular to the areas that haven’t had any real usage so far. And all the things customizable worked like a treat, so while most code is shared between admin and storefront, the things that make each unique have unique implementations.

I am not saying all is done, but looking at my tracking page for this job there isn’t a lot left either and all the fundamental issues have been address as far as I can see.

Some of the more fun bits included:

• Implement a db session handler compatible with the current zencart admin code
• An authorization handler that supports roles (this does work, however there isn’t any infrastructure (read: table) or UI to manage that)
• Getting the session code to work for real
• Finding out how much zencart code is actually still used deep within the codebase (at least for the admin side)
• Seeing that a (practically) independent app can make use of the ZenMagick API
• Implement things that were still missing in the MVC code. Some could have been done earlier, but without a real use case it’s hard to get that done and to get it right at the same time.

One of the things I might have to do now, though, is to go through all sources and come up with some better package names that reflect the new order. Also, I might re-think the idea of splitting off the MVC code into a separate project. Perhaps it’s not worth it, but it is really independent code, so it might be worthwhile.

Stay tuned…