ZC program flow and logic

I have sifted through a couple of previous posts and never really quite found the answer(s) I have been looking for. I was wondering if there is (even a basic) chart of the program flow of ZC operation on how things work if one wanted to learn how to code in PHP.

For example, what happens and what is loaded when a person goes to the home page of a site and in what order do those things load. Sure, you can look at the pages source and get a starting point (and I have seen on the wiki mention of the application.php part) but these things really do not help a "newb" learn the basic mechanics of the ZC world.

I am taking a couple of basic programming classes for school right now and I would like to be principle and theory into practice. Any help pointing to documentation or posts not on the wiki (or even adding that information) to the wiki would be very helpful.

Also if people were to learn the mechanics on how much of the program worked imagine over time the lead developers would actually get time to work on the things they want or need to get done.

tia :smile:

0be1

Something like this? http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&cPath=40_54&products_id=378

Dr. Byte;

I already have that as well and that did not help me understand much either. There has to be some way for a person who has a little experience in the way of programming to be able to step into (certain parts) of the ZC world and learn about program flow and mechanics.

Thank you for the reply though. Also I am not sure how much this document has changed up to version 1.3.8. Is there anyone on the design team assigned to documentation?

thanks again for your reply (promptly too!! :cool:)

Sincerely,

0be1

The concepts outlined in that document have not changed largely from 136 to 138.
That document was written to provide a high-level overview of how the procedural code flows on every click.
It's not really a programmer's guide, although I have often referred to it for a quick-check when debugging where certain things might be going wrong in someone's custom coding etc.

I would be willing to pay twice as much for a book that took you from the basics of php, limited to what is used in the site, followed by a description of what does what and when. Even a software decision tree, flow chart or logic diagram.
I get that the pages are asembled on the fly, from information obtained in a step by step fashion, but when I look at the source code on a delivered page, I have no idea of how it was assembled. This makes it hard to troubleshoot.
Using the web developers add on for FireFox has been a godsend in determining what comes from css and other stuff.

Of course a book like that would put developers out of work ( I really doubt that) but it would make some guru a ton of cash , and free up a lot of space on this board.

http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/Pages

This is a great companion piece to the troubleshooting guide. It explains the flow a little bit better.

Still haven't figured out how the forms are generated, ie for the multiple products vs a single product, and a bunch more I'm sure.

did you ever find what you are looking for?

Wow!

Most important thread on the site. Glad I saw this.

Does the program flow documentation have a 1.5 version?

For the most part things are pretty much the same overall flow, with the occasional added feature being loaded/instantiated, etc.
Is there something specific that you feel is missing, or some specific piece of information you're looking for?

DrByte:

For the most part things are pretty much the same overall flow, with the occasional added feature being loaded/instantiated, etc.
Is there something specific that you feel is missing, or some specific piece of information you're looking for?

Nothing specific, I am an experienced IBM iSeries and .net vb programmer with not a lot of php/mysql exposure. I want to try to create a module that does stock by attribute with a flag on the attribute that makes it a stock balance type attribute. i.e. Color and size would be drop-down attributes that would carry the stock balance flag, but a text box for Embroidery Text would not. I tried the current SBA module before reading the hundreds(seemed like) of posts on that thread and found out after the fact that all attributes turned into drop-downs and you could not enter a text attribute. My daughter has an embroidery business and needs the ability to do inventory by some attributes and not others.

I'm trying to figure out the recommended structure for module creation. I know what I'm attempting is not by any means a straightforward type of module, but I was hoping to find a "skeleton" module to start with that would give me a framework that I could fill in. I've reviewed some of the modules I've installed and although there are similarities in the folder/file structure, I don't see a clear framework. It could be that my vision is bad, though.

I've been perusing the Zen Cart customisation wiki and it all looks like good information, but it's taking a while to sift through it.

Thanks for your reply.