Best Practices

This the 3rd in a series about readying your plugins for PHP 5.3, and for PHP 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6.

NOTE: This post assumes some pretty solid PHP knowledge, because all the changes listed will require adapting your code to find a new way to do whatever it was doing before.

NOTE: This is not the complete official list of changes. I've edited this list down to the basics, catering mostly to the topics that might affect people writing plugins for Zen Cart. For much more detailed ...

Task:

• Storeowner wants to send the customer an email with a unique code when the customer creates an account.
• The code pattern is "ABC00001", where ABC is fixed text, and 00001 is the customer number, with leading zeros up to exactly 5 digits.
• There is no need to build a database of already-issued codes, since the customer ID number is already unique per customer.
• The store is using v1.5.0 code.

The thinking and coding process:
First, since this must ...

NOTE: UPDATED INFORMATION ABOUT UPGRADING CAN BE FOUND HERE:
https://docs.zen-cart.com/user/upgrading/


TL;DR / Executive Summary:
Are you looking for a quick way to understand best practices when upgrading your Zen Cart site? The easiest way to view it is as "a rebuild while keeping all the existing data."

This article contains 3 sections:
1. What an upgrade is, and what it is not.
2. An overview of how to rebuild a site using ...