2020 Recap

Yes, 2020 has been a crazy year for everyone!

Despite the surroundings, we've endeavored to continue improving Zen Cart for everyone.

Some of the things we've accomplished this year:

- Published a new Documentation site, which combines the best content from the wiki, the FAQs, the Tutorials, and countless updates from interactive help shared in real forum posts. It's easy to contribute more content to it via github pull requests.
Its search is fantastically easy and thorough -- check it out!

- Retired the old Wiki, FAQs and Tutorials sites.

- Published v1.5.7, v1.5.7a and v1.5.7b, which now supports PHP 5.6-7.4 versions. (A v1.5.7c is in the works to also support PHP 8.0 better.)

In addition to the Release Announcement outlining a lot of its new features, there's also a forum post containing Reasons To Upgrade to v1.5.7 which outlines a bunch more details about features included in 1.5.7!.

(Note: If you've installed 1.5.7 or 1.5.7a, you really should take 10 minutes and upgrade to 1.5.7b to benefit from some critical security updates.)

- Purged a ton of old forum spam. (A lot of it wasn't visible to most people, but it cluttered things badly for moderators.)

- Reviewed and approved updates to and new additions of dozens of Plugins


What's next?

We have no ability to predict the future, but the team and community are actively working on v1.5.8 which already contains a lot of internal code tidying, de-duplication, and other cleanup, making it easier for customizations and plugins to be written without having to guess so much about things. It also aims to make plugins easier to integrate.

In the "back room" we're always tinkering with possibilities of new/added features, testing their viability, and assessing whether they fit with Zen Cart. Some of those ideas never make it past the whiteboard. Others find themselves baked into core code.
We do review the "Features Wish List" section of the forum regularly. There are some fantastic ideas in there. We don't always have the expertise to take on the responsibility of implementing and maintaining those features, so some of them don't translate into core code. Nevertheless, posting there does catch the attention of the dev team and others on the forum. The more well-thought-out or community-discussed an idea, the more likely it is to get implemented one way or another.

Wishing everyone the best of success in the coming year!

DrByte