5.20 code snippets and other upgrade-friendly modification techniques

[ploughguy]

WIth the release of 5.2.0 with Product Options, I am ready to consider upgrading from 4.3.4.

 

My site has many important (to me) mods that I need to apply to the new release before it can go live, and I would like to do this in the cleanest possible way to reduce the cost of future upgrades.

 

Any hints?  There seem to be a couple of options for this - something called "code snippets" gets a mention in the 5.2.0 release note and there seems to be a way to integrate bigger bits of new stuff using the new template engine.  I have searched the forums 

 

I have googled "code snippets" in case it was the name of a technology but it returns every bit of PHP that anyone was ever proud of, so the term is not terribly useful.

 

The CubeCart Developer Documentation area (which I found by accident and cannot find again) sports the very promising phrase "Coming Soon" which, I am pretty sure, has been the status for some years now.

 

I figure there should be something written down, somewhere, about each of the following:

1. The new skin/template engine
2. The enhancement/extension technology
3. The mysterious "code snippets"

If you know where to find documentation on any of these, then please tell me where to look.

Thank you for your help.

[bsmither]

Sorry, I am not aware of any documentation that discusses how to use the code-snippets feature. I haven't had the time to tear into it.

 

The skin template engine is Smarty and can be researched at www.smarty.net.

 

Also, there is a minimal amount of documentation on how to build a hook-based plugin. See: http://helpdocs.info/ACP:Hooks

It would help if you downloaded a few of the available free mods at www.cubecartforums.org.

 

 

Feel free to start topics at cubecartforums.net for significant feature changes and enhancements.

 

On these forums, we can discuss minor tweaks to the code.

[Toucan Web Design]

Code snippets work more or less similar to the existing plugins, they can insert lines of code into a preset 'hook' within CubeCart. Unfortunately the issue of being unable to do anything if there's not a hook in the place you need it is still there, but it's starting to take steps forward I think.

 

Anyhow, basically they work the same as plugins, but if it's just a small fix or code insert, it saves you from writing out an entire plugin, so it's just a little easier to apply quick little jobs and such really. You can also send them as xml files for people to install directly into the snippets, which means that in the future, potentially when bsmither posts a fix to someones issue, he could just link a file, they upload it.. bam, fixed.

 

Depending on your knowledge of cubecart however, they're not very useful directly as an end user, as you'd need to know how to write the code to insert into them, and also know where the code needs to be hooked in, so mostly it'll be for developers

 

.. any of that make sense? I'm a little bad at explaining things sometimes, but that was what I got from it when I had a look into it on the beta