UI changes not possible from Admin

ZC has a ton of visual properties that are set in language definitions and code. These can't be reached (to my knowledge) from the Admin pages, so the files must be edited on client with a PHP or text editor, or on server with something like vi, but all outside of the ZC environment.

Is anyone working on a utility that will allow a wider variety of visual properties to be changed from Admin? Is there a module that exposes a stream of DEFINEs in a browser interface to allow an admin to change literal text without actually editing code? Has anyone designed but not implemented such a beast?

I can do this pretty easily in a Windows app, even with direct import/export from the server. Unfortunately I'm not qualified to do this in PHP for a server-side Admin plugin. :cry: Sorry.

TIA

What specifically are you saying you don't like editing outside the admin?

Some of this will be frowned upon since we're not making proper use of override mechanisms, but here we go:

• Modified includes/languages/english/classic/header.php with Alt/Sales text and Logo details.
• Modified several defines in includes/languages/english/login.php
• Several changes to defines in includes/languages/english.php.
• Added helpful links to maintenance messages in includes/init_includes/init_header.php
• Various changes made to tpl_header.php and tpl_footer.php.
• Branded several pages with 'txt'.STORE_NAME.'txt' in defines and code.
  So can any of these updates be done from the Admin pages somewhere? I know define_pages_editor handles some of it and I didn't mention the pages above that we changed from there.

Best advice? Learn how to use the override system. If you don't you will be very sorry when you go to upgrade someday.

As for the original complaint - more and more customization will be available from the admin in the future.

I see it's the editing of the language files that you dislike the most, along with some of the template files.

First, no, there is not presently a PHP-driven UI for editing your language/text files.
However, there are lots of Windows-based and Mac-based applications that can handle editing the DEFINE() statements and template-file content quite well. Some of the more popular ones are NotePad++, TextPad, Smultron, BBEdit, even Dreamweaver or Zend Studio.

:blush: (sorry, I couldn't find a tongue-in-cheek smiley ... the blush will have to do)

There are a number of very good reasons for doing things the way they are done presently, which I've enumerated in these forums on various occasions. Some of them include, but are not limited to:

• the quick ability to support multiple languages (granted, if you've only used one language, you won't appreciate the value of this as much)
• the quick ability to handle multiple layouts and themes
• the fact that "once set", the majority of your language-file and even template/css content probably won't change greatly until the time comes where you make larger changes which probably would warrant being considered a "new" template, which means you'll be spending focused time on a specific set of files anyway
• if you want to make the majority of your site files (ie: your language and template files) editable via your PHP-driven Zen Cart admin back-end, you're going to have to leave all those files in a "writable" state on your webserver ... which isn't really a "best practice" due to the security risks it presents

As Kim mentioned, there will be a greater degree of layout control available via the admin in the next version, with more improvements continuing as time progresses.

It's not clear which "branding" or "visual properties" you think belong in the admin side or why.