Templates Obsolete With 2.0??

[Vinyl Signs]

@Vinyl Signs Fear not.

That's a relief...

I just wanted to make the point (not very well it seems ) that while Zen Cart is great for those building stores as a hobby or on a low budget, it is also a great platform for professionals building fully-featured, high volume stores for larger and often highly profitable businesses, when the budget spent by warrisr and often much more, is very common.

I think that is the great strength of zen - as you say - it is a great starting point capable of handling low budget - and high end (not that I see any )

[bigbadboy]

You said that you have just finished work on the site about 6 months ago.
Judging by the conversations/ threads I think it'll be around 6 months before ZC2 is a solid, stable release perfectly suited for live projects.

My clients and I always do design/ development reviews around 6 - 9 months.
Therefore when v2 is ready you should be considering an overhaul anyway, in my opinion.

[kobra]

My clients and I always do design/ development reviews around 6 - 9 months.
Therefore when v2 is ready you should be considering an overhaul anyway, in my opinion.

I believe that the OP's point was covered in his original post and one that bears consideration...

I thought the whole point of a template driven system was to separate the underlying code from the presentation and content so that I am not constantly re-writing presentation level stuff?
At least that's the way other systems work. On my blogs I am using templates that are over four years old with the latest version of WordPress.

[schoolboy]

I recall a few howls of anguish when ZC moved up from 1.2 to 1.3 .

When I have preliminary meetings with (potential) clients, part of my pitch involves the need to budget for software upgrades in the future (or at least understand that upgrades will cost money).

Nobody like to be told that MORE money may be necessary, but if people are aware that upgrades come along, and will involve some costs, then they are usually more resigned to that eventuality.

I explain that upgrades are essential - mostly for security and performance efficiency (vital in the world of e-commerce), but that new software often introduces additional features that can have a positive benefit to a web shop.

Also, OPERATING software (eg: php, mySQL) advances too, so FUNCTIONAL software has to keep pace.

Software upgrades are a fact of life in the computer business (how do you think Bill Gates got rich(er) ?)

[novastar]

Templates are one thing, I figured the template system out but I guess I could deal with that if I had to. What really irks me and really kind of stuns me is the voiding of the mods and custom add-ons. This, to me, seems like the biggest thing since some developers have given up on well-enough and some risky-at-best projects. Some mods are special finds and some developers simply won't want to rework all their projects. Some of these mods have become really necessary e.g. customers in wishlist or newsletter subscribers and database tables that have already been created and populated. Is this really good for business? I don't see the need or major benefit for such massive changes but hopefully these issues will be resolved.

[novastar]

Its not that bad I guess, everyone will have to find their way around it and it does include the much requested sku system, so..

[kuroi]

Zen Cart has a ton of great features, but its architecture is out of data and looks increasingly clunky and difficult to work with compared the best of breed products in other categories of open source software.

This makes it less and less attractive to the developers who produce and maintain the mods that you value, and makes their supply and support increasingly likely to dry up.

Zen Cart 2.0, when it appears one day, will address that directly, and yes, there will be a wobble period while developers come up to speed with the changes and new (and better) ways of doing things, but hopefully the end result will be more and better mods, rather than a long slow death and waking up at your desk one morning to discover that everybody else has left the building.

Oh and as an aside, both templates and modules are much more than the physical code - they're also the thinking that goes into how they look and work, and that's not lost, even during a major upgrade - it just means that somebody needs to adjust the implementation of those ideas a little.