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.