After some conversation in the ZenMagick online chat (you can also use pidgin, Gajim or any other decent IM client, of course..) I started playing around with the view related code in ZM.

A first result can be seen in the screenshot below. [Btw: the theme in the images is the Modern theme created by rubikintegration.com] Essentially it comes down to the following two four lines of code in tpl_index_default.php:

view = ZMUrlManager::instance()->findView($request->getRequestId());
$view->setLayout(null);
echo $view->generate($request);
return;

Of course, this doesn’t really scale well, in particular if the view expects some model data provided by the controller. So, some very crude cut & paste (actually just two lines..) and we have:

$controller = $request->getController();
$view = $controller->process($request);
$view->setLayout(null);
echo $view->generate($request);
return;

As proof a further screenshot:

Time for another update. There has been a lot of work behind the scenes to make contributing to the project easier. The biggest change in that respect is that we are slowly moving towards using a redmine powered system to replace most of the currently still used sourceforge features.

The new dev system is already up and running and we’ll be slowly introducing features as we go along. If you want to have a look, it’s at http://dev.zenmagick.org/.

Coding wise there has also been some progress – details follow:

• block code for sideboxes/banners
  All themes (incl. the default theme) have been updated to using the new block code to display sideboxes and banners. This is (for now) backwards compatible. Once the new block admin UI is finished, this will become the preferred (and only) way to configure things.
• email preview
  A basic version to preview all email templates is working and integrated into the admin UI. The is a lot of polish missing still, but it is functional.
• A lot more changes to make the languageId mandatory across API calls.
• Bug/regression fixing as usual

Seeing that I have missed a couple update reports lately I figured it doesn’t really matter when exactly I do write this one

The last couple of days have been rather unproductive, in particular since having zenmagick.org down meant that chat was also down. Let’s hope this never happens again. The status of the domain changed back to active, so I hope it will be over really soon.

Before going downhill things have been exceptionally good. Most of the visible (not right now, of course) progress can be seen on the wiki. Lots of new pages and especially two pages about:

• Blocks
  Blocks are kind of supercharged sideboxes. However, the concept goes far beyond that. Eventually it will be possible to place blocks anywhere on the page with either a simple custom HTML tag (kinda), or a simple method call. Once the wiki is back up, details may be found here: http://wiki.zenmagick.org/index.php/Dev::Template_Blocks
• Improved support for including/referencing css/js resources. There are plans to extend the current system with dependency checks, potentially support for versions (for example jquery version 1.42, etc)

Perhaps the best news is that a lot of this design work has been done as a discussion (of three people). Yes, that’s right. It looks like finally help is on the way

As far as actual work is invovled, a new admin page to manage templates has been added. This is the (extended) replacement of the current Zen Cart ‘Template Selection’ page. A positive side effect of this work is that there has also been a lot of cleanup around themes and how/where things are handled.

Not sure if everyone is following wiki changes, so I’ll just repeat here the last entry that has been made to the reference sites list (been a few weeks already):

Party Market Online
Party supplies/costumes – simple deployment of ZM, but stress-tests ZM code on a over-19,000 item catalog with 1000+ categories.

I have to admit that I am quite pleased with the final performance of this store. There are a number of levels of caching (page/template) using memcached and also a number of improvements/fixes to the category related code to make this work properly.

I am very happy (and also rather tired) to finally having released ZenMagick 0.9.10.

The main focus for this release has been to get the new admin UI up and running. RubikIntegration have been generous with help on the design and part of the implementation and I’d like to say ‘Thank you’ for that.

Of course that is not all, but instead of repeating things over and over again, just a couple useful links:

Official Release Notes

Details about upgrading

Other than that there isn’t a lot to add, except for a link to the ZenMagick 0.9.11 roadmap. It’s already filled with all sorts of things. It will be interesting to see what we can mange to get done. If there is anything missing let me know.

mano

It’s been a week of small things. Lots of polishing, going through the various roadmap lists, the admin UI todo, etc.

Also, thanks to some external testing a few small bugs got fixed. I’ve also started on the apidoc generation and at least the generic code is in a presentable state.

The biggest issue is that phpdoctor doesn’t support multiple source directories and I’d rather keep a single documentation tree – at least for this release. But even if things would get split, there is still code in more than one place. More thinking to do….

Apart from that I’ve been busy with other stuff and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

As for the next week – I’ll be looking into what features could still make it into the next release and what not. Not an easy task, but required to be able to move on.

With the new admin UI being almost at par with the old code it is about time to think about the next release to get those changes out.

It certainly will be a few more weeks to cleanup a few things, feed out any old code that is now used any more and generally test and fix regressions. Stil, it looks like there is finally something to aim for.

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.

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: