Blog: Zen Cart 1.5.7: What's in, what's out

Development of Zen Cart 1.5.7 is an on-going activity. Here are a couple of notable changes:

What's In?

The following new features have been added:

1. Ask a Question on product-information pages.
2. Encrypted Master Password.
3. Report All Errors.
4. A configuration option, enabling disabled products to indicate a temporary redirect (302) rather than a page-not_found (404).
5. Auto-loaded observers, now in the admin, too!

What's Out?

The following features, present in previous Zen Cart distributions, have been removed:

1. Initial installation's support of a latin1 database character-set. New installations will use a form of utf8.
2. Page parse-time logging.
3. The payeezyjszc payment method is no longer distributed as part of the base and must be installed/updated separately.
4. The configuration setting Maximum Values::Allowed Filename Extensions for uploading has been removed from the database and is now set as a constant within /includes/classes/upload.php. If a store has made modifications to the default value, those changes will need to be transitioned to the in-file setting.

What's Changed?

Some of the changes in this Zen Cart version could affect plugins and add-ons:

1. The minimum PHP version is now 5.6.0. This will be especially problematic for stores that are upgrading from Zen Cart versions prior to 1.5.4, since those versions of Zen Cart did not operate under PHP 5.6.
2. The storefront "auto-loading" now preloads some of the more basic Zen Cart classes, e.g. class.base.php. If a plugin requires a non-standard auto-loader "prefix", the plugin's auto-loader will require update for continued operation under zc157.
3. $_SESSION['check_valid'] renamed to $_SESSION['check_valid_prod'] and is now a boolean value, see this Zen Cart PR for additional information.