After a long time waiting, Zencart team will release the new Zen Cart v2.0.0. It was originally planned to be released at the end of 2008 but they will most likely to release the upcoming Zencart 2.0 release early this year. The following will cover what you can expect from new Zencart 2.0.0, which is a summary of what I got from Zencart forum (Comming soon Zencart 2.0.0).

Speed
An emphasis has been placed on improving performance by various methods, especially reducing the number of database queries required for processing pages.

Code
For the programmers, you’ll be happy to know that the code has been largely converted to a much more efficient OOP structure, which will ultimately end up making future growth much simpler.

Templating
Templating is much simpler, in that the complicated PHP blocks that used to make them so hard to read or follow or customize have been removed. Stylesheets are leaner. And there are some very easy-to-use admin-side layout controls to make setting your desired layouts *much* simpler.

Overrides
The same override system exists for templates and language files, meaning that those already familiar with that part of the directory structure will find it easy to continue using.

Languages
UTF-8 support is now native, and the more complicated language files have been simplified and split off into their own for easier management.

Written for PHP 5
Zen Cart 2.0 takes advantage of features specific to PHP 5.2 and MySQL 4.1, thus, those are the new minimum requirements for your hosting service to provide in order to run it. CURL is also highly recommended.

And Many More…

It’s time to move our system from Zencart 1.3.8 to Zencart 2.0.0 and for those who are planning to customize Zencart system, I would just recommend you to postpone it. So that you can implement the changes in Zencart 2.0.0 directly to reduce overhead cost.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 4:46 pm and is filed under IT, Web Development, Zencart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.