glitchbit:
Can this work with ZenMagick also?
Yes and No. To understand why, let me explain a bit more what ZenMagick is (as there is obviously still need for clarification).
ZenMagick consists of two main blocks:
1) A object oriented API on top of the zen-cart database.
This is basically a collection of PHP classes that can be used to code things like this:
$productService = new ZMProducts();
$product = $productService->getProductForId(3);
echo $product->getName();
Of course, there are much more methods to access nearly all data on products, accounts, addresses, the shoppingcart, etc.
Code like that above can be added anywhere in your code. This includes templates, header files, etc.
2) An alternative templating (themes) system.
This is a fully blown MVC (model-view-controller) based architecture that implements nearly all zen-cart templates files using the ZenMagick API.
There are quite some advantages:
- Clean template code (no SQL)
- Full control over the generated HTML - all HTML can be customized without touching any ZenMagick or zen-cart files.
- File based page caching
- Simple validation framework where both client side (JavaScript) and server side validation share a common configuration
- Easy to extend
- Plugin architecture (not finished yet :)
- For more check the ZenMagick website and/or the ZenMagick Blog.
It is possible to use the API and some of the other features together with zen-cart templates. That means you can keep your existing templates, but build additional features using the ZenMagick API. In that case the mod will work together with ZenMagick.
If using the ZenMagick theme code, though, mods that include zen-cart template files will not work. Pure admin mods are not affected.
Hope this helps,
Cheers, mano
