Hi everyone,
I’m in the middle of an extremely large project with multiple addons being developed to extend the administration and customer sides of cs-cart.
Because staying withing budget is always a priority, I took it upon myself to learn how to create an addon that is accessible in the admin settings section and that is designed to extend existing cs-cart functionality, such as the user authentication system, the categories and product systems.
Some of my discoveries include…
- How the “had to look to find it” /admin.php?target=settings_dev file is used to add new addons and extend cs-cart with new and additional settings that are definable within the administration web interface.
- 75 existing cs-cart module areas that allow ANY addon to plug into it. This is how the Listmania addon shows up everywhere (Categories, Products, Pages, etc…)
- How an addon can register itself to be included in any of the 75 module addon areas mentioned above by creating only 1 php file.
- Core cs-cart functionality that handle data manipulation between the user interface, the template system, the shopping cart programing logic, the database and finally the user (admin, customer, mail and partner)
- 2 files that are automatically loaded with any active addon that allows you to first define the configuration data that your addon program needs to function properly and the necessary php functions that interact with the cs-cart system and your addon.
- The necessary folder structure that is needed for your addon code and skin/template files.
- And a few other intersting discoveries with the template system for addons as well.
I’m not sure how long this current cs-cart version will be in place, but I’ll try post a follow up to this post shortly on the step-by-step process I’ll be using to create addons for cs-cart 1.35sp3.
Let me know if you’re interested in that.