How to Contribute to Zen-Cart - aka Zen-Cart for Dummies!

[g2ktcf]

This is more an informational post than anything else. Over the past few weeks, I got involved in some discussions with the development team about where ZC is headed in the future. Now, I am NOT one of those developers, just a guy peaking over the fence! I am the dummy in the post title!

A bit about me -> I am an industrial project manager (my actual title is so long we all laugh about it "Principal Project Engineer, Piping and Mechanical Project Engineer") I have been doing mechanical projects all over the world for going on 2+ decades. I am also a self described geek. I learned to program back in the early 80's using Fortran 77 (that is how old I am). I have done small independent little things in VBA, Fortran, C, C++, C#, PHP, Python, Ruby, Java and JavaScript. I have never worked with a group collaboration. In short, I can code quite well...but contributing to ZC intimidates me (see Example below).

A while back, the industry I was in (I did oil rig projects for almost 10 years) literally died and I was laid off for the first time in my life. I needed something to do to keep me sane so I ended up teaching at my local high school. I taught engineering, robotics, physics and chemistry to our local youth. While this was a pit stop for me as the employment market improved, there were some valuable lessons learned about how to teach. It is not an easy thing. Some of the best teachers are NOT the smartest people in the room.

So why am I writing this? The above mentioned discussion has pointed out that the development team needs new team members. This team is the best there is, but they are few in number with a large mountain of work to be done. This limits how far changes and improvements can go or at the very least how FAST it can go.

Example of Why ZC intimidates me: I do not know Git. That was a major flaw in my learning and thanks to torvista and swguy, I believe that that missing mental link was found early this morning. In fact, it made me late for work because I got excited and had to install the Git client and get my fork cloned to my local machine. Did this last statement make any sense to you? Well, that is in part that Github is its own unique "language" so to speak. So, my goal here is to use this thread and those that follow (How to Contribute to Zen-Cart Part X) to help you feel more comfortable being a part of the solution!

So, I am going to document my journey here for others. PLEASE feel free to follow my steps (along with my corrections as that team corrects me!).

So, what am I going to include? Well, everything really but I use Windows 10 so if you use a Mac or a Linux box, your experience will be different. This is NOT the final list but just my first thoughts at how it should look. I will only use FREE tools in this process. There are paid versions out there but I am not that good.

• Local Web Server setup for multiple PHP formats. This is the standard LAMP stack

• Installing Git Client (I will use the command line version as I am used to MS-DOS)

• How to use Git in a local development environment (I will use the command line version as I am used to MS-DOS)

• Using Netbeans combined with Xdebug as a development tool.

• Hosting. What is needed and what is not. (I will use my host as a example as your host will be different)

• Installing Zen-Cart. This has been done in the past but my goal is to literally make a picture based, step by step process

• Upgrading Zen-Cart. This is a big one including how to use WinMerge to track and make changes

If you are interested in following along, I would like to know! Please reply to this post. If you wish to share something about yourself and why you are here would be helpful. If you would like to see something specific that I do not have listed above, let me know!

Thanks
Chris

[swguy]

Please don't document things that are common to any LAMP project and easily google-able. Things that are specific to Zen Cart are fine.

Start here:
https://docs.zen-cart.com/dev/contributing/

[g2ktcf]

Please don't document things that are common to any LAMP project and easily google-able. Things that are specific to Zen Cart are fine.

Agreed. The problem can be that some "easily google-able" items are written by folks that seem to skip steps. They can also assume a greater level of prior knowledge that the reader may not have. The goal would be to point to specific links where I know that steps are not skipped OR point to the link with additional information as needed. I would add "here are the mistakes I made" like NOT running XAMPP control panel under Administrator...omg I cannot tell you how many times I have had to reboot over that mistake! lol.

[simon1066]

To make any meaningful contribution to the Zen Cart Docs I've decided that I really need to have a local copy to be able to properly preview any contribution. Thinking 'how hard can it be' I made a half-arsed attempt at installing Hugo, on Windows, without success - when I eventually make it work I'll try to document it.

[swguy]

This doesn't work?

https://gohugo.io/getting-started/installing/#windows

(I'm not a Windows guy so I can't advise further.)

[simon1066]

Now I remember, I did install Hugo but it was what to do with it afterwards that I think I had problems with. I'll revisit it again.

[torvista]

I did install Hugo but it was what to do with it afterwards that I think I had problems with

Snap. Frustrating waste of time that I had successfully forgotten about.