ZOO release date

First we are a little surprised by all the buzz in our comments of our latest article about the ZOO licenses. This is the first time that we release an extension that big like ZOO, and it was somehow obvious to us that the ZOO extensions will be a YOOtheme product of its own along with its own website and subscription model.

We want to give peek behind the scene of the ZOO development process for better understanding why we think this way. First time we came up with the idea to create a catalog system was at the end of the 2007. Then in early 2008 we started to write down notes about the new catalog system extension we had only in our mind until this time. This whole planning process took over three months, and it did not involve any programming yet. It was just about expressing our ideas on paper and before actually creating the first prototype. Then we started the development for the extensions code basis in May 2008. To help you to get an estimate how many hours the development has taken we have some interesting statistics for you.

Today we run a tool to count the lines of code the ZOO extension and compared them to the numbers of our YOOaccordion and YOOslider modules. Following files are covered: PHP, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, XML, SQL. No images are included in these statistics.

• ZOO lines of code: 24 741 (232 files)
• YOOaccordion lines of code: 686 (19 files)
• YOOslider lines of code: 903 (25 files)

In conclusion one YOOtools module or plugin has approximately 3.6% of the amount of lines of code compared to the ZOO extension. These are just the numbers... when we developed the ZOO extension over the past months you cannot compare it with a race where you have a fixed start and finish line. It is more like you have a constantly moving finish line, because you always have to review and learn from the steps you took already. Even sometimes you go a few steps back just to change the direction because you have found a better path to follow. All in all you can imagine how much effort we put in the ZOO extension.

We stated four weeks ago in one of our comments to “expect something like the current YOOtheme memberships“. But we can also understand that this was not clear enough and our terms of use seemed misleading to some of you. But of course the terms of use on our YOOtheme site apply only to the template club memberships (Platinum, Gold and Silver) and the templates and YOOtools licenses are clearly stated. So everybody who felt misled and bought a developer license only to get the ZOO extension can drop us an email to info@yootheme.com, and we will refund the template club membership.

Further the subscription model for ZOO Pro edition explained in our previous blog post is final. You can read about all the details on the upcoming website to inform you about the ZOO features of the Pro and Lite edition. That said we are looking forward to enjoying our ZOO release which will be later today. We started a countdown on yootheme.com/zoo