I just noticed that the function zen_get_attributes_price_factor() is using a define that doesn’t seem to be set anywhere in zencart at all.
The name of the define is ATTRIBUTES_PRICE_FACTOR_FROM_SPECIAL. it seems to control whether to use a special price or the regular product price as base for the calculation at hand. Looks to me as if this has never been implemented properly or it is just an artefact from some code cleanup…

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

Another “unscheduled” update since it seems I can’t manage a weekly update right now. Things are ticking along nicely, although there haven’t been any major developments.

Main focus (again) was on improving the existing code to make live easier for plugins. Also, a few gaps in the API have been filled, most notably the new ZMTaxClass.

Main code changes:

• Templates now have a new widget() method at their disposal to display/render widgets or widget definitions. This is mostly aimed at making custom plugin pages easier, but templates can use this too.
• Upgraded jquery to 1.4.3 and 1.8.6 (UI)
• all email content generation code is now using the new ZMEMails service – this makes a lot of email related code obsolete and a lot cleaner
• all bean definitions can now be customized via individual settings; for example this line of code would tell ZenMagick to use a custom FooBarclass to be used (with caching disabled) as product service instance: ZMSettings::set('zenmagick.core.beans.definitions.Products', 'FooBar#cache=false');
• address checking for guest checkout (and checkouts generally) has been improved and does not rely on a zencart event any more
• The checkout_payment page controller is now capable to handle basic payment types; this is still disabled since some logic and checks are still missing – still some major progress
• streamlined some ZMShoppingCart methods and further removed dependencies on zencart
• url encoded payment module error messages are now handled by the messages service, so no custom code needed any more (payment_error/error)
• more progress on making $languageId mandatory for all API code
• the product finder ZMProductFinder now supports a new flag to search active only / all products – this is disabled for storefront searches, bu means the searcher code is really useful for new admin functions

There has also been some more testing (and fixes) to integrate the current zencart admin pages seamlessly in the ZenMagick admin UI.

As far as a new release is concerned: there hasn’t been done any planning yet, but I am aiming for a new release for middle of December, so not a lot more work will be added. On the one hand that is a shame as the next release will contain less genuine admin improvements than I was hoping for. OTOH, the zencart admin integration is certainly a big step forward to making ZenMagick admin the place to go to to manage your store

Somehow, today, I started experimenting with integrating zen cart admin pages into the new ZenMagick admin UI.

While the master plan is to re-implement all required features rather than reuse, it would still be nice to have a complete interface without having to switch back and forth.

Instead of trying to describe what it looks like, check for yourself:

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.

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.

I’ve started a German translation of the admin UI that will be included ni the next release. It has become quite obvious that I am not a great translator. In fact, the german translation sounds a lot mor wodden and artifical to me than the english original. Go figure…

Anyway, it’s a start. Right now the strings are in a .yaml file, but in the long run I’d love to move to a web based translation tool and also move to the gettext based pomo code. If anyone is interested in helping with translations let me know.

In any case it will be good to have a second language to test switching and making sure all strings are covered.