Howdy folks. This announcement has been a long time a’comin’ but the zen cart developers have finally announced that zencart 1.4 will not ever come out. Does this mean the end of zen cart? Is the soon to be released 1.3.9 to be the summation, the culmination, the termination of all things zen cart?

Hmmm. well no. What it actually means is that Zen Cart 2.0 is coming out! The advancements put in place are revolutionary in scope. Latest versions of php and mysql are REQUIRED. ALL templates and plugins will need to be redesigned! ALL. This is a major redesign… kinda like going from Windows to a Mac. Everything is going to be different and radically faster. There are less queries to the database which means a massive increase in speed of pages rendering and a big decrease in load on mysql on the server.  

I feel this is a massive announcement and quite bold. Add-ons will become plug and play like in WordPress. Less design work will be needed as a lot of this will be taken care of in the admin section. I personally hope this DOES lead to something elegant like the admin of a wordpress.  It will be a radical change for people to learn it but it will be beautiful and fast and a needed revolution.

Stay tuned folks. I’ll be demoing the beta soon and will provide screencasts of these improvements and hopefully avoiding all of the bugs! 😀

Interesting story about how Google now ADMITS to manually manipulating rankings… We’ll see how this one plays out… I think I know how this is being impacted… if my clients start screaming I’ll at least have a plan…  will write more on this soon

And wow what a big change! This should really be known as 3.0!  I recommend upgrading as soon as possible!  The admin is the bomb with tons of new features it is almost too numerous to count.  Great work guys! This is really an evolutionary leap forward for WordPress!

WOW is all I can say…this is THE future of the internet coming right NOW folks… Video right from within your GMAIL account… AND I have confirmed this works within Google Apps for Your Domain Gmail account as well as I have several.  No idea how this works on a PC but on the Mac it is rather seamless.  Can’t wait for the API to come out for this so we can then have Gmail VIDEO chats from right within my website to clients… time to start brushing my hair everyday and wearing better looking clothes! 😀 Just kidding… here is a screenshot of it in action…

I chose to pop out the window to its own window. There is even an option to make it full screen. Overall, this feels tighter and faster than Skype so far. Skype is still kinda buggy as I still get odd dropped dropped account connections occasionally. Clients will email me a question cause they think I am not online!

Howdy folks! Hope everyone is into the winter holiday season in full swing by now! I finally got around to redesigning my main site (zen cart) and the blog site (wordpress) to make them look a bit more uniform. It was just CSS changes though and some photoshop stuff. I mainly just made the content div tags transparent then added the main background a lightened robot with the magnifying glass. Way easier than I anticipated. And lastly, I added in a cross web app search tool in zen cart to search through the wordpress blog as well. This was pretty easy to set up as well. It is based on http://www.sphider.eu and is really cool. It requires a bit of programming to get it to run perfectly, but after that, it just rocks! I really like it as it takes all of the search results and puts it right into a defined page of zen cart. -Tom