With the relase of ZenMagick 0.9.10 I hope there is no real need to explain what I did the last week, so I’ll skip this weeks update post.

However, there is a tiny bit of work left on the release and that is to open up the new admin demo. Yes, that’s right! The new ZenMagick admin UI does have support for a demo mode, just like zen-cart, although I am not sure how safe the ZenCart part it.

So, hopefully by the end of the week (or, more likely, after the weekend) there should be a link to the admin demo site. It’s something that has been requested (and searched for) a few times, so hopefully it will help people understand what ZenMagick and the ZenMagick admin app are.

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

I just realized that it is time for my weekly update, so here it is.

Not much happening in the last 7 days. Lots of cleanup, helping out with a couple sites, fixing a few things, re-shuffling of roadmaps and some last minute changes. Things are down to three items on my todo list; I am afraid the remaining items on the 0.9.10 roadmap will most likely move forward to 0.9.11. [Incidentally, that is where most of the left-over items of the dev/admin todo list ended up ]

So, there are three things left, plus some minor tweaking of the full release install pages:

• Emails
  For some reason emails are defaulting to the zen-cart email templates – I swear it worked a couple days ago!
• The remainder of the languageId cleanup, although that might actually also move to 0.9.11 as it will require some bigger changes [something that just ocurred to me writing this!]
• sync the database mapping file between admin and store

I’ve added some steps to the build process that allow to enable/disable locale for a release build, so, seeing that the German translation is not yet ready the admin UI will most likely ship with en_NZ only.

Well, looking at the new snapshot I uploaded two days ago it should be easy for anyone interested to judge for themselfs

Having said that, since then I haven’t been idle. The catalog tree now actually reflects the category selected, editors are improved, the version check widget does some proper version comparison and a few funny things have been fixed.

Testing will start in earnest now and I expect the next snapshot really to be of RC quality.

Also, there is ongoing work on the website. I’ve started updating the wiki roadmap pages and even already created a new one for 0.9.11!

If you have any interest in a new shiny ZenMagick (and therefore Zen Cart) admin UI, now is the time to come aboard – any input is welcome and since I have no preference for what to implement next this could be your chance to decide what to implement next!

Last night ZenMagick 0.9.9 was released. It took me a while, but I am pleased with the result. As usual, the actual release process was the most painful step! I don’t know – somehow these admin tasks do not appeal to me

I think changes to theme files have been reasonable and there is a good chance that this is going to be less and less with each coming release.

The changes to the MVC code make up most of the release. I think it’s been like this for a few releases now. Just as well that this time a couple new plugins have found their way into the release.
The productGroupPricing plugin is perhaps the biggest news. It allows to configure individual prices for each product and each customer group. Since prices can be either discounts (absolute or percent) or absolute prices, its possible to use this to implement price tables, based on user group. Furthermore, each price/discount can have a start/end date and may also be excluded from being used for other discounts.

The other plugin is the productTags plugin. It allows to tag products. Effectively, this may be just used for a tag cloud or, perhaps more interesting, to create relationships between products.
It is possible to query products for given tags or all products that share tags with a given start product.

With the work on a new default theme somewhat stalled, work on the next release will focus a lot on admin improvements. However, there is also a lot of other interesting stuff in store, so worthwhile to keep an eye on the development and this blog
If yo feel there is anything important missing from the roadmap/feature list, let me know.

Seeing that I am close to releasing ZenMagick 0.9.9, it seemed like a good idea to have a quick look at  Zen Cart 1.3.9 (BETA).

Since there are no real changes to the structure, ZenMagick does work without any problems after a Zen Cart upgrade (although, I did a fresh install). So, after upgrading, all you need to to is re-run the ZenMagick file patches (via admin: ZenMagick -> Installation or admin: Tools -> ZenMagick Installation).

The only issue I had so far is related to my dev environment (I think). It might be more common, though. Loading the initial SQL during installation fails with an SQL error: “1366 Incorrect string value: ‘\xA3:&eur…’ for column ‘configuration_value’ at row 1”

Other than that, upgrading stores using ZenMagick will be just the same as upgrading a pure Zen Cart installation.

Seeing that the code is still labelled BETA,  I would expect that the full version of ZenMagick 0.9.9 will be still based on Zen Cart 1.3.8a. A one week public beta as announced by Zen Cart does seem a bit short, though…

I thought I’d give everyone a heads up that I’ve finished the toolbox code refactoring that removed the $echo parameter from all methods. With the exception of l10n and i18n that should be the last big change to templates.

I also fixed the Language Tool – sorry, I think it must be broken in 0.9.8 already. Seeing that hasn’t been a single complaint so far I assume it’s not widely used

I’ve also started working on some basic branding of the installer and admin pages. If this gets released it definitely makes ZenMagick a separate product – at least the full installation release.

… or, things to come II

For the last few releases I’ve been bumbling along, changing whatever I fancied and never really worried about anyhting. The closer ZenMagick moves towards a 1.0 release, the more difficult it becomes to continue doing that.

There is a long list of things I want to do and also a list (not on paper) of things that I think should be in 1.0. There are two things I really should get done to give the releases a bit more direction and also (re-)assure users that there is actually hope to get to a 1.0 release at all!

1. Prioritize the visions list and split it into two listsl; one including things that will be in 1.0 and one with things to come.
2. Eventually I’ll have to face the fact that after a 1.0 release I’ll have to spend more time doing proper branching in order to keep the APIs stable for a while. At the same time there should be work on future versions with new/changed APIs and stuff from the visions list that didn’t make it into 1.0.

I guess one reason why it takes me so long to get there is #2. Branching and maintaining several branches (for example a 1.0.x branch and also a 1.1.x branch) is not something I am particulary looking forward.

in conclusion, I will try to start working on a more substantiell roadmap towards a 1.0 release and put that on the wiki once it is fleshed out enough to be of any use.

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 just updated the demo store with a release candidate version of ZenMagick 0.9.5.

There are some interesting visual and other changes that the demo store illustrates:

• Use of PDO based database API
• New plugin to switch between ZenMagick and Zen Cart template
• Improved event support for Zen Cart templates (that’s what the switch is really for!)
  The extended event support now allows ZenMagick plugins to manipulate the final HTML of Zen Cart templates. That means, all ZenMagick plugins that rely on this mechanism can now be used in Zen Cart templates, too! Obvious examples are the page stats and style switch plugin (even though the style switch doesn’t really work for Zen Cart templates, right now).

One thing that is now good to see is the difference in database queries. Even though the Zen Cart default template and the ZenMagick themes do not display exactly the same data, it’s still impressive to see the difference in queries

I somehow lost my release notes so the public release will have to wait until early next week to give me time to get organized again.

Happy demo’ing!