Last night ZenMagick 0.9.5 was finally released! I am quite excited about this particular release, because it includes a couple things that make ZenMagick a lot more attractive to existing Zen Cart installations.

For one thing, there is a new patch that allows plugins to access the final HTML content of Zen Cart templates. This has been around in ZenMagick (for themes) for quite a while and proves to be very powerful.

A lot of the storefront plugins (page stats, page caching, google analytics) depend on this feature and now they can be used with Zen Cart templates too!
If you head over to the demo store you’ll see that the HTML generated by the default Zen Cart template is caches like any other page, following the same rules!

Another quite surprising thing (at least  for me!) is the new PDO based ZMDatabase implementation. It seems to be the fastest implementation so far and the demo store seems to do fine using it, so I might make it the default implementation for the next release.

There are also improvements to existing plugins and, of course, a couple new ones. The most interesting one is probably the phpBB3 plugin. It provides the same features as Zen Cart’s phpBB support, just for phpBB3.

I also really like the new theme toggle plugin that allows to switch between Zen Cart and ZenMagick. Probably not very useful for a production environment, but good to compare features, displayed values, etc.

Of course, this is not the end, and I’ve already started working on the next version. In that context a reminder that with 0.9.6 I’ll be removing a lot of the deprecated stuff. Also, the deprecated API support will be removed before a 1.0.0 release, but most likely not before 0.9.8.

I’ve spend some time today playing around with the isEnableZMThemes setting and the consequences.

The main issue so far is that even though Zen Cart templates work fine now, quite a few plugins are useless, because they manipulate the final HTML via the call to ZMPlugins::filterResponse().

To fix this, I created a new file patch today. It’s the first since quite a long time which goes to show that things have been rather stable for a while.

The new patch will modify includes/application_bottom.php and insert a single (rather long) new line. That line contains the full response filtering and event handling code required to make plugins work.

For example, the page_stats plugin is now able to inject the page stats into Zen Cart templates and even page caching does work!

So, from 0.9.5 on it will be possible to cache the  HTML repsonse from a Zen Cart template using any of the available caching implementations (xcache, memcache, file) to speed up page delivery!

This brings us a lot closer to a stripped version of ZenMagick that does not include theme code and only supports plugins and admin enhancements. I wonder if that would be good to go back to the zen-cart site as add-on…