ZenMagick

Yesterday I checked the creole homepage for updates and to my horror I discovered that the project is being abandoned. While I can understand the reasons behind this step to a degree, I still feel sad on different levels. I’ve picked creole as alternative to the current Zen Cart database code as it seemed mature and, [...]

I think releasing the themes prior to the next ZenMagick release was probably a bit too optimistic. I just realised that there are a couple more things that the new themes depend on. One thing that is for sure is that I added a couple new classes to some of the default theme templates (mostly result list [...]

I actually just now released the first four public and free (covered by a Creative Commons Attribution license) themes. There might be some glitches, as I developed against a trunk version of ZenMagick, but except for a small issue with highlighting the correct header navigation item I can’t think of anything that should cause the to [...]

I’ve been playing around with implementing new ZMCache provider. xcache is nice and easy to test, in particular since it comes with a simple admin interface to dump the cache entries. I just found something similar for memcache and it was really a big help. Besides being able to verify that adding/removing from memcache worked, it helped [...]

To verify that creating new themes is really as easy as it proved to be using styleshout templates, I decided to add another one, this time from a different source. The result is similar. Typically, the CSS of the template can be used as-is [with some minor exceptions], complemented by a custom theme.css to get the [...]

Since zen-cart removed the ZenMagick download and support thread from their site I am a bit stuck with reaching a wider audience. I’d anticipate spending a bit more time on promoting ZenMagick than before. This is not entirely bad and something I was planning on tacking at some point anyway, so it’s just a bit earlier [...]

Database stats When looking at the database query/timing stats of the page stats plugin, it is important to notice that when using ZMZenCartDatabase as database provider for ZenMagick numbers are not what they seem. The $db stats will include all ... [More] ZMZenCartDatabase queries as internally $db is used. That means to really understand what is happening it [...] [Less]

I recently registered ZenMagick on the ohlo.net website. If you ever wondered where other projects get the funny stats from, like number of lines of code, estimated cost, # of developers, etc. - this is one way of doing it. Until I find the time to add that to zenmagick.org,  here are the general stats - not [...]

Examine database without additional tools Yesterday I needed to check a database table on a remote site. Since there was no access to phpMyAdmin or similar I was a bit stuck. I started thinking about using the PHP console that comes with ZenMagick and the result was the following line which will dump a bit of information [...]

As promised, a quick update that the demo store has been updated. I will make the new themes available ASAP, we’ll see how that goes. The build process is in place (mostly), but I can’t find the motication to fight with sourceforge at the moment. Anyway, comments and patches welcome