Time for another update. As usual I am going to tell you that things are progressing nicely

And this is no lie! I’ve ticked off a few issues this week already, although those were all small changes. It felt good to see the list shrink, though!

I am very determined to finish the block admin – it is the basis for a lot of other template related changes. For example it will replace the current sidebox admin and allow to manage arbitrary elements anywhere you like.

A full list of items still to be done is in our issue tracker. Besides that, I do have some client related work that unfortunately takes precedence every now and then.

Still, I am in a good mood (enjoying German summer also helps!) and looking forward to the next release.

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.

A mixed week with some good results, too!

Testing is progressing, unfortunately it also uncovered a few things that need fixing first :/ On the plus side I’ve upgraded useo2 to the latest version and there is even a script that can patch the code so it runs in the new admin.

Most of the required changes are using ZMDatabase rather $db and a couple other things, for example support for the category urls.

I am also very close to getting a couple sites upgrade to the latest 0.9.9+, or, better 0.9.10RC. It will be good to get some real usage to see how good the code really is :0

Apart from that there are a few improvements that now allow to cache individual template files. For example, each sidebox can now be cached or not. The current caching code itself is rather simple, but it should be easy to make it as complex as required.

This is now enabled as default, as is support for PHP short tags. That is done as a custom filter that will change all <?= or <%= to proper <?php echo syntax.

Again, this is just to get some mileage, I do not expect that a lot of people will be using this initially.

Category caching now works properly, so even a couple thousand categories won’t slow things down too much on the storefront side. The backend/admin will need a bit more time. Again, template caching will make things a lot easier in those cases.

I’ve added a new APC based cache implementation. It does cache things, clearing the cache is still a bit buggy, but if you are keen you can always use the APC admin interface to clear the cache.

The cache admin page now properly shows all used caches and groups. I hope that will make it a lot more useful Outstanding here is some sort of central caching config for each cache type. This will be possible either with smarter settings or the still unused context code.

The last week I have been mostly busy with four things:

1. private stuff
   Just as the title says…
2. testing
   I’ve done a fair bit of testing. Found a number of regressions, fixed them, found some more…
3. localisation
   I’ve added an experimental german transaltion for the admin UI, but it is both incomplete and not that great. Localisation is definitely something where the project will have to rely on volunteers.
4. paid work
   Sounds better than it is – the ratio of unpaid/paid is pretty sad. Having said that, the paid work uncoveres a surprising number of bugs/regressions and therefore is multi-purpose, which is not to be dismissed.

Apart from that I have continued looking into planning some proper translations for the admin UI. I have most of the work done to export strings as .po(t), so hopefully it is now mostly a matter of finding the right place to manage translations in an accessible way.

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!