Zen Cart Forum

[digitaltoast]

What Zen really really needs is a decent admin system.

The first person to write a javascript or ajax admin for Zen will be a rich man - I'd certainly pay for a copy!

I mean, the way Zen is, now, is geared towards tiny stores with a handful of products. Yes, you can Easypopulate thousands of products in, but then what?
There are some very simple tools to do mass updates of names and prices, but what if you want to move 20 products between categories? At least 6 clicks per product.

And attributes are a nightmare. Once you've worked out attributes (and I don't believe anyone fully has), you are then presented with a highly unintuitive system, where all the values for all the names are presented in a tiny, tiny box which needs masses of scrolling. OK, so I've made the box 100 high, but still, if you want to apply 15 colours to a product, why does it also present all the size options, when you can't use them? And why must those options be added one at a time? Why not allow multi-select?

I rather think that the team may have lost their way a bit with the development cycle. I mean, a major point release having a major feature of it being xhtml compliant?! NO-ONE, and I mean NO-ONE cares about that. Amazon isn't compliant, Google isn't compliant.
What the store manager cares about is getting the job done so he doesn't have to employ a string of students who all leave after a couple of days because the task of adding attributes and products is so tedious.
What the customer cares about is a quick response, not a system on a go-slow because each page takes close to a thousand queries.

If Ajax was ever made for something, it's this. The team need to sit down and look at the interface of, say, Wordpress. And even if they can't bring themselves to Ajaxify it, a matrix of tickboxes wouldn't go amiss...just so I could tick 11 boxes and say "move these to this category" or "delete".
The phpmyadmin interface is a good example of what I'm talking about.
Also, take a leaf from the Wordpress plugin system, where a plugin must follow a standard in which it identifies itself, its version, and its homepage. The world of Zen plugins is "drop me an email and I'll send you a copy, mate". No uninstall routines.
There are a couple of Zen contribs authors (Tim K etc) who write contribs to a very high standard, but the rest will leave you with over-written code and a database full of crap when you remove them.

I know they do it for "free", I know they are way ahead of Oscommerce, but their development system is closed source, and by that I mean "closed to suggestions" too. Gallery have a "features vote" system whereby someone adds a wanted feature, others vote on it, and the top votes get priority. That way, things the developers didn't even know were wanted, like bulk watermarking, hidden galleries and flickr style tagging, have been incorporated. But the same basic functionality which would make Zen a winner has been asked for for 3 years now, with barely a hint of a "perhaps in the future" response.

Anyway, rant over. Thoughts?

[digitaltoast]

Sadly, no. I just have three years of trying to make Zen work for people, and hearing exactly the same thing over and over and over again.
"The admin sucks". "The admin sucks". "The admin sucks".

I also did a short course on what developers think is needed, and why it is almost always opposite to what the customer wants. If the Zen Cart team really had, as they claim, run stores and enjoyed the tedium of clicking and clicking, I think we might have had a slightly different cart by now!

Go for it - I feel SURE the person who makes the admin work, will find themselves with very willing customers!

[David Benn]

We are working on it