I happened to notice a  search ‘when is zencart 2.0 actually coming‘ in today’s log. It’s a good question. Unfortunately I do not know the answer, but I do know that the next ZenMagick release is not far!

Today I checked in the final changes to make the category pages use the new sql based pagination code that hopefully will be on par with the way Zen Cart handles it [(except for being a lot more complex, of course ].

That means that the last bit I was hoping to get into the next release is actually in place. I’ll be doing some more testing and try to figure out which plugins need updates. That should hopefully get me to a point where I can write release notes and build ZenMagick 0.9.5 next weekend!

I think I really need to do something about the plugins. Ideally, they would all have their individual changelogs, but right now with core changes that affect pretty much all plugins that seems to be overkill. I guess for 1.0 that might be something to look into, though.

Coming back to the search mentioned above: Of course there is no need to wait for Zen Cart 2.0 in order to enjoy things like:

• Plugins that do not require file changes
• A simple template structure that does not need include/require
• A database API incl. DAO‘s, transaction control and support for different database providers
• A MVC based framework
• Flexible form validation with rules to change both JavaScript and server side validation in a single place
• Guest checkout aka. checkout without registering
• and a lot more

Just start using ZenMagick today!

One of the new features in the upcoming Zen Cart 2.0 version is going to be a reduced number of database queries for price lookup. Most of those queries are attribute related and therefore do not affect all stores/products.

Due to the current work on making ZenMagick properly available for Zen Cart templates, I’ve had the chance to do some easy comparisons. (more…)

I have read the recent announcements for Zen Cart 2.0 with great interest. Obviously this will mean a lot of work for me (and everyone keen to update).

For obvious reasons I have mixed feelings – it’s great to see Zen Cart finally catch up with a lot of other good carts. On the other hand there is a lot of overlap of features between Zen Cart 2.0 and ZenMagick.

Even though it is hard to really asses where this will leave ZenMagick, I am confident that there is still room (and need) for a lot of the things that make up ZenMagick. We’ll have to wait and see the code in detail, though.

Meanwhile I’ll be working on another release that should bring a few new things again. I also might push a minor bugfix release, since I found a few things broken in 0.9.4 (and 0.9.3, for that matter). We’ll see.