[pmwiki-users] ZAP future plans

The Editor editor at fast.st
Wed Mar 7 21:08:31 CST 2007


Ok, one more quick email then I'm done for the night...

Here are some of the plans for the immediate future of ZAP.  If anyone
has input, would like to add items to the wishlist, or has specific
suggestions, feel free to provide input now.

1.  Change how ZAP modules work under the hood, to make it extremely
easy to add plug in zap functions for any kind of capability you want.
 In fact except for a few of the more important modules, most of the
miscellaneous ZAP commands could be stripped out and made available
individually as needed--by cut and pasting directly to a config file,
or whatever.  I'm hoping that will encourage more coders to tap into
the zap engine for custom applications.

2.  Add a new ZAPphp command that allows you to execute limited php
commands on fields such as substr, time/date, caps/lowercase, encrypt,
etc.

3.  I'm also wanting to add a ZAPmath command which would allow fairly
basic arithemetic capabilities.

4.  ZAPmail and ZAPnews will probably be merged as they have a good
bit of overlap, and I'd like to merge their capabilities.  That is,
I'd like to make it just as easy to schedule an individual email for
sending six months in the future, as it is to do that with
newsletters.

5.  Update ZAPchat so it refreshes using AJAX.  ZAP can already do
most of the required functions for simple messaging, but I plan to
keep the ZAPchat module as a way to add in a full range of IRC like
commands to your chat room.

6.  Update ZAPcart so it is a bit more configurable.  It's already
working pretty well, I just need to add the documentation.  Also, I'd
like to do server side processing of the order form, rather than
client side.  Perhaps using the math command?

7.  Create a new ZAPquiz module.  I have a very simple but powerful
plan thanks to some ideas from Crisses months ago for a module that
will automatically grade quizzes virtually anyway you want to grade
them, display those quiz grades in various ways, and finally compile
multiple quiz grades into a course grade and automatically calculate
(weighted) averages for that.  Sounds complex, but it is quite easy.
Can't wait to take a shot at it.

Cheers
Dan



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