ZenMagick Zen Cart the easy way
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shopping database access Zen e-commerce Zen Cart e-commerce application

ZenMagick Description

Zen Cart the easy way ZenMagick is a Zen Cart add-on. It provides database access to virtually all data releveant to templates (and more) via an object oriented API.ZenMagick also includes an alternative theme/templating system which offers a superior separation of application code and custom HTML.The compressed philosophy of ZenMagick 1. Store design and layout should be done via HTML/CSS 2. Presentation and application code should be separateZenMagick layout and view files are exceptionally simple to make real customisation as easy as possible, while still supporting useful Zen Cart admin settings.ZenMagick and Zen CartDespite doing some things fundamentally different, ZenMagick and Zen Cart are a team. Without Zen Cart and the large range of features it provides, ZenMagick could not exist. Requirements: · Zen Cart What's New in This Release: Zen Cart mod: · The traditional form. A package that contains only ZenMagick code that can be installed on top of any Zen Cart 1.3.8 ZenMagick installer: · A full package including all required Zen Cart code. A good choice for new installations. · In addition, both ZenMagick and also the Zen Cart code included in the full installation version are now PHP5.3 compatible! · The next major change is that now all code uses Savant3 as base for all templating. This is not to say that Savant is a templating enginge. It's just a simple, yet effective way to locate and load template files. It also provides additional, still unsed features to allow, for example, caching. · Another big change is the ongoing refactoring of all MVC code. A lot more code is now generic and moved from being storefront specific to generic. In the long run this will help to develop and improve the framework and storefront code independatly. · One important change affecting plugins is the implementation of the new conventions for plugins (and their code). This affects all plugins, with the result that right now not all plugins are available. There is a process underway to identify plugins that are still needed. Eventually, some will disappear, though. This is where participation in the forum and wiki is essential. · All admin UI code got refactored and now uses the same MVC code as the storefront. This harmless sounding fact should not distract from the fact that this is the foundation that will allow to rewrite and (re-style) the admin UI. · The plugin manager page also got some attention and now uses Ajax to easily allow to enable/disable plugins. · The last big changes affects configuration. So far a lot of configuration data (url mappings, for example) have been wrapped in PHP code. With the introduction of YAML support (using spyc), this has been simplified considerably. This is also an ongoing project with more files to be changed (database mappings, etc). · This release also fixes quite a number of bugs, so upgrading is recommended. Plugins: Universal changes: · Change of names to reflect the new plugin naming conventions · Changed setting names, also reflecting the new plugin names · All plugins now use the same MVC code as admin and storefront. This includes plugin admin pages, custom storefront pages and also catalog manager plugins. Individual changes: Page Stats: · Display stats for all used database connections. Quick Edit: · Add support for read-only widgets; part of that is that setProduct($product) is called on the widget for each row. Theme Switcher: · If no setting found for the theme list, default to a list of all installed themes. Wordpress: · Observe the syncUser flag. OpenID: · Upgrade to (PHP5.3 compatible) version 2.1.3. Unit Tests: · Patch simpletest to get rid of deprecated warnings. · Add code to load additional tests via setting. · Allow to configure an alternastive database connection to be used for all tests. · Do not break if test cases are not found. Minify: · New plugin to transparently convert all references to CSS and JavaScript files with minify URLs. Themes: · Using Savant · A few changes in this release also affect themes. Most prominently, using Savant changed the way templates include each other. · So far, templates included each other using PHP's include statement. Layout files would include the main view via include $zm_view->getViewFilename();. · All this has now changed to using $this->fetch() method. For example, a layout will need to execute echo $this->fetch($viewTemplate);. Note that $viewTemplate is now the name of the variable holding the name of the main view. Filenames passed into fetch() are assumed to be relative to the content folder. Theme inheritance still applied, with plugins included in the search path in case of pages added by plugins. (This means themes are free to implement custom views with the plugin included views as the fallback). · $zm_view has been deprecated · Apart from removing the use of $zm_view for including the main view, the variable has been dropped altogether. This means that $zm_view->getName() as used up to now will not work any more. The replacement is to use $request->getRequestId(). · The name requestId is now uniformly used throughout the code for the value of the main_page value. Meta Tags: · The meta tags service has been downgraded and converted into a toolbox tool. This requires to change all use of ZMMetaTags. For example ZMMetaTags::instance()->getTitle() would now be $metaTags->getTitle(). · Please refer to the default theme to see more examples. Crumbtrail: · Same as the meta tags, the crumtrail service got converted into a toolbox tool. Consequently the current usage $macro->buildCrumbtrail(ZMCrumbtrail::instance() now looks like this: $macro->buildCrumbtrail($crumbtrail, " > "). Admin: · All ZenMagick admin pages now use the same main entry point: zmIndex.php. This change allowed to convert all admin pages to views, using the same MVC pattern (and code) as the storefront. While this process is not complete, there are some visible changes already. · The most obvious being that plugins now apply to admin pages too (at least the ZenMagick ones). For example the page stats plugin report will now show up at the bottom of ZenMagick admin pages. · This is just the begin of some planned major improvements to the admin UI. Initial tests have revlealed that it is relatively easy to convert Zen Cart admin pages the same way...

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